“Without the fear of hell and the hope of the Last Judgment, the Western legal tradition could not have come into being.”– Harold J. Berman
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” — John Adams
“Communism begins where atheism begins.” — Karl Marx
“Every time a society finds itself in crisis it instinctively turns its eyes towards its origins and looks there for a sign.” — Octavio Paz
My boyhood years in El Pao, which I still regard as a paradisiacal jungle location in Venezuela, gifted me with wonderful, cherished moments and memories.
One of those remembrances is sitting at the bar in the club and listening to the rambunctious, freewheeling, carefree, and often loud conversations of the men who assembled there after the 4 O’clock whistle. These men spoke of the news, of events back home in the states, of the prior night’s movie, of anything that occurred to them. And they did so without inhibitions and certainly with no concern about being “censored” or “cancelled”.
One thing that I never thought about was bad language — four-letter-words. I never thought about it because I never — not once — heard one uttered in those conversations.
This became a wonder to me as I looked back, especially after seeing the movie, The French Connection, in 1971. That was the first time I heard so much foul language in a film, in particular, the bar scene where Popeye crashes a drug scene fingered by an informant.
The wonder to me was that I had not heard such words from the rough and tough men — several of them combat veterans — who talked loudly with one another in that bar in El Pao. They knew I was there. And they checked their profanity accordingly. And this also applied when ladies were present.
Parenthetically, there were no laws then against children being in the bar in El Pao. And I never saw a single drunkard there — man or child.
How did the American men in El Pao know that profanity was not to be uttered in front of children? Undeniably this hearkens back to the colonial era, a strong echo of which is seen in George Washington’s strict orders to the Continental Army forbidding profanity — especially taking the Lord’s Name in vain — and enjoining attendance at Sunday worship services.
Any cursory reading of the era’s primary sources will readily establish that the basis for such proscriptions and prescriptions was not “custom” or “tradition” or “squeamishness”. It was the love of God and the fear of God. And that love and fear is abundantly in evidence throughout the colonial era and well into the mid 19th Century.
No doubt that genuine devotion eventually did indeed devolve into custom and tradition; so much so that European intellectuals in the 20th Century mocked the “prudish” and “Puritanical” Americans, many of whom in turn would not know how to explain the moral foundations for their behavior other than by appealing to custom and culture, not to Christianity or the Bible.
Octavio Paz’s reference above is a statement of which I am not so sure. I see precious few folks today turning their eyes to our origins in order to seek answers to the current lawlessness in our cities or to the haphazard enforcement of laws in our politics. I hear or read precious few allusions to the Mayflower Compact, John Winthrop, Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, or John Witherspoon, let alone to the Book of books, The Bible.
All of the above, and much more, would comprise a major part of our “origins”. If we are to seek a sign there, we’ve barely begun to look.
But begin to look, we must.
John Winthrop — 1587-1649
Some of the men of El Pao