More from Ron Wells

After covering a chapter on the Enlightenment, Ron Wells discusses the two major revolutions of the Enlightenment, the American and French Revolutions in his History Through the Eyes of Faith.

I will quote a few paragraphs of "The Age of Democratic Revolutions", including the conclusion, because I think the words are wise and humbling because of our tendency to affirm the glories of one revolution (America) over the other (French) without looking at the deeper philosophical movements that undergirded them.

For example, he states that there was not just one American revolution, but in a sense, two revolutions: the revolution of the Declaration of Independence and the revolution of the Constitution. He asks the real American Revolution to please stand up.

On a rhetorical level, the American Revolution is a "liberal" revolution, in that people have believed, with Ralph Waldo Emerson, that Americans "fire the shot heard 'round the world," the first shot in the struggle for democratic liberty. On a real level, the American Revolution is a "conservative" revolution in that people have believed it preserved liberty under the rule of law. It is the wrong question for us to ask which revolution is "for real" because both exist in the American memory: Rhetorically we say America is a liberal democracy; really we know America is a republic.

After examining the different phases of the French Revolution Wells concludes,

Finally, what can be concluded on Christian terms? We must be careful of labels here, remembering that terms like conservative and liberal cloud more than illumine the argument. It would seem consistent with what we have formerly said (i.e., that Christianity and the Enlightenment are theoretically incompatible) to suggest that Christians might observe the failure of Enlightenment principles and say, "That's to be expected."

But, the question remains: Does that conclusion lead Christians to observe that the American and French revolutions were, in the end, middle-class revolutions and say, "That's good"? In short, it is all very well to oppose the radical version of the Enlightenment on Christian grounds (as the Dutch politician Abraham Kuyper later said, to be "antirevolutionary").

But Christians must beware lest they back into a baptizing of middle-class republics. And this is all the more clouded by the fact that, in the United States, many Christian citizens confound the clarity of the matter by the very baptizing of a middle-class republic in terms not of the reality of a republic but the rhetoric of the democratic Enlightenment. They call conservative the radical ideals of the eighteenth century--individualism, opposition to central government, and the belief that a good society offers scope for an ever-expanding liberty.

The Constitution of the United States was, after all, "based on the philosophy of Hobbes and the religion of Calvin." It presupposes a view of society that is historically illiberal, and, one supposes, Christians today who still believe in that way must be corporatist and elitist, not individualist and democratic. For Christians to confuse the rhetoric for the reality of the age of revolutions and to champion the liberal values of the Enlightenment while calling them conservative values consistent with a Christian worldview is to join Lord Cornwallis's band in playing the song "The World Turned Upside Down."

When the Pledge of Allegiance is recited we say "and to the Republic for which it stands," not "and to the Democracy for which it stands."