Moses, the Patron Saint of Washington
By Bruce Feiler
Sunday, October 18, 2009




When the Supreme Court began its new term this month, the justices went to work in a building overflowing with Moses. The biblical prophet sits at the center of the structure's east pediment; he appears in the gallery of statues leading into the court and in the south frieze of the chamber; the Ten Commandments are displayed on the courtroom's gates and doors.

Similarly, when the House of Representatives gathers, the members meet in a chamber ringed by 23 marble faces, including those of Hammurabi and Napoleon. Eleven look left; 11 look right. They all look toward Moses, who hangs in the middle, the only one facing forward.

Elsewhere in the nation's capital, the prophet is ubiquitous. He stands in the Library of Congress. He appears in front of the Ronald Reagan Building. Images of his tablets are embedded in the floor of the National Archives. And nearly every occupant of the White House, from George Washington to Barack Obama, has invoked the Israelite leader to guide Americans in difficult times.

Moses is the patron saint of Washington -- and a potent spiritual force in nearly every great transformation in American history, from the nation's founding to the Civil War to the civil rights movement.

Why did a 3,000-year-old prophet, played down by Jews and Christians for centuries and portrayed in the Bible as a reluctant leader, become such a presence in American public life?

Because, more than any other figure in the ancient world, Moses embodies the American story. He is the champion of oppressed people; he transforms disparate tribes in a forbidding wilderness into a nation of laws; he is the original proponent of freedom and justice for all.

His part in the American story begins with the Pilgrims. A band of Protestant outcasts who felt oppressed by the Church of England, they saw themselves as fulfilling the biblical story of the Israelites, the descendants of Abraham who were enslaved in Egypt and freed by Moses, then journeyed toward the Promised Land. When the Pilgrims set sail on the Mayflower in 1620, they carried Bibles emblazoned with Moses leading his people to freedom.

By the time of the Revolution, Moses had become a staple of proponents of American independence. In 1751, the Pennsylvania Assembly chose a quote from the five books of Moses for its statehouse bell: "Proclaim Liberty throughout all the Land unto all the Inhabitants Thereof -- Levit. XXV 10."

After the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776 -- under that future Liberty Bell -- a committee made up of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams set about designing a seal for the new United States. Their recommendation: the Israelites crossing through the parted Red Sea, with, as their proposal described it, a ray of fire "beaming on Moses who stands on the shore and, extending his hand over the Sea, causes it to overwhelm Pharaoh."

To beleaguered colonists seeking freedom from the superpower of the day, the story of another oppressed people achieving freedom was a powerful precedent, especially since it was taken from the ultimate source, the Bible.

When the Israelites crossed the Red Sea, though, they quickly descended into lawlessness, with the 12 tribes bickering and complaining about their leader. The solution was to bind them under a new law, a new covenant: the Ten Commandments. (The Bible says the Israelites "re-enslaved" themselves.) Similarly, "God's new Israel," as America was called, entered a period of disarray after the Revolution, and the result was also a commitment to stricter law: the Constitution.

The critical figures in each instance, Moses and George Washington, were warriors as well as lawmakers. Reluctant leaders, both resisted the temptation to turn their nations into monarchies. The analogy was not lost on the new nation. Two-thirds of the eulogies on Washington's death compared him to the biblical prophet. One orator even likened Washington's death before the completion of the District of Columbia to Moses's failure to reach the Promised Land.

The American promised land, however, featured an element of Egypt: slavery. Here again, Moses proved influential. Forced to adopt Christianity, African slaves across the South found kinship in the story of an enslaved people who escaped their masters. Harriet Tubman sang slave spirituals about Moses as coded messages when she led people to freedom on the Underground Railroad. As her fame grew, she adopted the alias Moses, triggering a wave of posters: "Wanted Moses: Dead or Alive."

On Thanksgiving in 1862, as the Civil War raged, Harriet Beecher Stowe, who used the Exodus as a major theme in "Uncle Tom's Cabin," visited the Washington barracks of fugitive slaves who had joined the Union army. After the blessing, the room sang the most famed spiritual of all, "Go Down, Moses," which Stowe's sister dubbed the "negro Marseillaise."

And when Abraham Lincoln died on the threshold of the promised land of victory, he, too, was compared to Moses in many eulogies. "What was the work which Moses was called to do?" asked a Connecticut preacher. "It was nothing less than to deliver his race from slavery. The work before our late beloved president was the same. God called him to free the nation."

Political figures weren't the only ones likened to Moses -- so were national icons. Uncle Sam was compared to the prophet for leading immigrants across the Atlantic; Old Glory for going into the wilderness during the Civil War. And the country's greatest symbol, the Statue of Liberty, was designed to mimic Moses when he came down from Mount Sinai with shafts of light around his head and tablets of law in his hands. On the statue's opening day, Cuban patriot Jose Martí described her as walking "as if to enter the Promised Land."

The presence of Moses in American iconography grew in the 20th century, even as the Bible declined in influence. Woodrow Wilson was compared to Moses for creating the League of Nations, and Franklin Roosevelt for defeating Hitler. Lincoln Steffens's 1926 book, "Moses in Red," called the prophet the founder of communism, while Bruce Barton published a book calling him the greatest capitalist who ever lived. And the builders of the Supreme Court in the 1930s used Moses as the ultimate exemplar of the rule of law.

But it was Cecil B. DeMille who truly elevated Moses to his status as a hero of the American century. His film "The Ten Commandments," released this month in 1956, turned Moses into a Cold Warrior. The Israelites were mostly played by Americans; the Egyptians by Europeans. DeMille himself appeared at the opening of the film to denounce Soviet-style tyranny. And he persuaded Paramount to place 4,000 stone Ten Commandments monuments on courthouse lawns around the country. The publicity stunt became the basis for a 2005 Supreme Court case that approved such displays as long as they had secular purposes.

Today, the Hebrew prophet is as resonant as ever. Early in his presidency, Bill Clinton explained his support of "don't ask, don't tell" by informing a group of senators that Moses went up Mount Sinai and came back with "God's top 10 list." "I've read those commandments," he said. "And nowhere in those Ten Commandments will you find anything about homosexuality."

George W. Bush said in an Oval Office interview that he was inspired to run for the presidency by a sermon in Texas in which his preacher said Moses was not a man of words but still led his people to freedom.

And Barack Obama said in 2007 that while the civil rights pioneers were the "Moses generation," he was part of the "Joshua generation" that would "find our way across the river."

Most striking about Moses's enduring appeal is that a figure introduced into America by white Protestants proved equally appealing for blacks as well as whites, immigrants as well as the native-born. Moses fits the American story because he embodies the courage to escape hardship and seek a better world. He keeps alive the ministry of hope.

He also encapsulates the American juggling act between freedom and law. Moses represents independence, but as the deliverer of the Ten Commandments, he also represents the discipline of being a people of laws. From the Mayflower's "covenantal people" to Bill Clinton's campaign promise to build a "new covenant," American leaders have invoked the Mosaic covenant to project a sense of cohesion and common purpose.

Finally, Moses is a reminder that a moral society is one that embraces the outsider and uplifts the downtrodden. "You shall not oppress a stranger," God says in Exodus 23, "for you know the feelings of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt." In that sense, the prophet represents the ideals of American justice.

Yet while leaders often invoke Moses, they, like him, may not see their hopes come to pass. When the Pilgrims' dream of creating God's kingdom failed, for example, their leader, William Bradford, retired and wrote mournful poems comparing himself to Moses. And the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., on the night before his assassination, invoked Moses's heartbreaking death in the wilderness. "I've been to the mountaintop. . . . And I've looked over. I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the promised land."

King's message reminds all the justices, lawmakers and presidents who come to work amidst the Moses images in Washington today: The ultimate goal for a leader is not to reach the land of milk and honey yourself, but to make it possible for others to get there.

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Bruce Feiler is the author of "Abraham" and "Walking the Bible," which was made into a PBS miniseries. This essay is adapted from his new book "America's Prophet: Moses and the American Story."

God vs. Science Isn't the Issue Seldom do we act as if life has no moral component.

• By WILLIAM MCGURN
• When the poet Matthew Arnold wrote of faith's "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar," the thought was that scientific inquiry had forever undermined claims to certitude. In hindsight we see Arnold was only half right. In place of Genesis we now have scientism—the idea that science alone can speak truth about man and his world.
  

In contrast to the majority of scientists whose wondrous discoveries seem to inspire humility, today's advocates of scientism can be every bit as dogmatic as the William Jennings Bryans of yesteryear. We saw an example a week ago, when the New York Times reported that many scientists view "outspoken religious commitment as a sign of mild dementia."
The reporter was Gardiner Harris, and the object of his snark was Francis Collins—the new director of the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Collins is perhaps best noted for his leadership on the Human Genome Project, an effort to map the genetic makeup of man. But he is also well known for his unapologetic talk about his Christian faith and how he came to it.

Mr. Harris's aside about dementia, of course, is less a proposition open to debate than the kind of putdown you tell at a private cocktail party where you know everyone in the room shares your orthodoxies. In this room, there are those who hold that God cannot be reconciled with what science has discovered about the human body, the origin of the species, and the beginnings of the universe. The more honest ones do not flinch before the implications of their materialist principles on our understanding of human dignity and human rights and human freedom—as well as on religion.

In 1997, for example, an International Academy of Humanism statement in defense of human cloning—whose signatories included scientists such as E.O. Wilson, Francis Crick and Richard Dawkins—went out of its way to attack the special dignity of human beings. "Humanity's rich repertoire of thoughts, feelings, aspirations, and hopes seems to arise from electrochemical brain processes, not from an immaterial soul that operates in ways no instrument can discover." They concluded "it would be a tragedy if ancient theological scruples should lead to a Luddite rejection of cloning."

Here's the problem: Almost no one really believes this. Not, at least, when it comes to how we behave. And the dichotomy between scientific theory and human action may itself have something to tell us about truth.

That's not to deny electrochemical brain processes and the like. It is to say that much as we may assent to the idea that we are but matter in motion, seldom do we act that way. We love. We fight. We distinguish between the good and noble and the bad and base. More than just religion, our literature and our politics and our music resonate precisely because they speak to these things.

Remember Peter Singer? Mr. Singer is the Princeton utilitarian who accepts scientism's view that human beings are not fundamentally different from animals, just more complex. In his thinking, those who cannot reason for themselves or have lost their self-awareness have no real claim to life. Yet when Alzheimer's struck his mother, he paid for care to prolong and sustain her life. The irony is that an act that does him credit as a son must discredit him among those whose principles about life he claims to share.

To put it another way, while we talk about the clash between God and science, in practice it often comes down to disagreements about man and morals. The boundaries are not always neat. Many Americans who are indifferent to faith will confess they find themselves challenged as they try to raise good and decent children without the religious confidence their parents had. The result may not be a return to religion but a healthy agnosticism about agnosticism itself.

I once had the opportunity to interview one of my heroes, Sidney Hook. This was a man whose commitment to his atheism and secular humanism was beyond question. One example: A doctor saved Mr. Hook's life by going ahead with an operation against Mr. Hook's wishes. Mr. Hook recovered—and promptly published an op-ed taking his doc to task.

It is possible, of course, to imagine a good society in the absence of a belief that man's dignity comes from his being fashioned in God's image. Something of the sort would have been Mr. Hook's ideal. Yet in his writings, the Almighty in whom Mr. Hook did not believe makes an extraordinary, one might say miraculous, number of appearances. When I asked him why he was not more dismissive, Mr. Hook replied that he was never comfortable with the dogmatism of the village atheist.

Perhaps he thought it "a mild form of dementia."

http://www.parade.com/news/2009/10/04-how-spiritual-are-we.html

October 4, 2009 Washington Post Parade Magazine

The Fate of the Spirit The wobbly religious lives of young people emerging into adulthood.

By NAOMI SCHAEFER RILEY College professors have been complaining about their students since the beginning of time, and not without reason. But in the past several years more that a few professors—to judge by my conversations with a wide range of them—have noticed an occasional bright light shining out from the dull, party-going, anti-intellectual masses who stare back at them from class to class. Young men and women from strong religious backgrounds, these professors say, often do better than their peers, if only because they are more engaged with liberal-arts subject matter and more inclined to study with diligence.

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The Country Today/Associated Press Teens gather at a worship ceremony in Green Bay, Wis.

If you want to get a sense of why this might be so, look no further than "Souls in Transition," by Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith. Examining the data from his vast longitudinal National Study of Youth and Religion, "Souls" uses statistics and face-to-face interviews to paint a picture—not necessarily a pretty one—of the moral and spiritual lives of 18- to 24-year-olds in America.

Religion, of course, does not make people smart—as Richard Dawkins and other atheists will tell you. But it does seem to save young adults from a vacuous and dispiriting moral relativism. The study's interviews with nonreligious or semi-religious "emerging adults" tend to show vague powers of moral reasoning and a vague inarticulateness. Take this all too typical explanation from one respondent of how one might tell right from wrong: "Morality is how I feel too, because in my heart, I could feel it. You could feel what's right or wrong in your heart as well as your mind. Most of the time, I always felt, I feel it in my heart and it makes it easier for me to morally decide what's right and wrong. Because if I feel about doing something, I'm going to feel it in my heart, and if it feels good, I'm going to do it."

Mr. Smith notes that the persistent use of "feel" instead of "think" or "argue" is "a shift in language use that expresses an essentially subjectivistic and emotivistic approach to moral reasoning and rational argument." He concludes that such young adults "are de facto doubtful that an indentifiable, objective, shared reality might exist across and around all people."

By contrast, young religious people have been made to think seriously and speak publicly about Big Questions from a young age. They do believe in a reality "out there" that can be studied and apprehended. Their answers to the study's questions are crisper and surer than those of their nonreligious counterparts. Amanda, a young woman from a conservative Christian denomination, tells her interviewer: "First and foremost, I believe that there is a God who is all-powerful and all-knowing, who created the whole universe. I believe what the Bible says about him."

The core of reality for students like Amanda is of course religious, but their belief in the very possibility of a nonrelativistic truth may well give a boost to their classroom seriousness, not to mention their verbal clarity.

But Amanda is unlike most members of her generation. Emerging adults in America, Mr. Smith says, are "the least religious adults in the United States today." Only about 20% attend religious services at least once a week, a 22% decline from Mr. Smith's survey, five years ago, of the same group of young people.

In the absence of any firm religious belief or clear idea of morality, many of the study's subjects have decided that "karma" is the best way to make sense of the universe. By this term they mean that, as Mr. Smith puts it, "good attitudes and behavior will be rewarded in this life and bad will get what it deserves too." The gist seems to be: "What goes around comes around." As one student says: "Karma's a bitch."

It had better be, because there is apparently not much else motivating nonreligious young adults toward charitable behavior. As Mr. Smith summarizes: "Any notion of the responsibilities of a common humanity, a transcendent call to protect the life and dignity of one's neighbor or a moral responsibility to seek the common good, was almost entirely absent among the respondents."

Souls in Transition
By Christian Smith, with Patricia Snell
(Oxford, 355 pages, $24.95)
Read an excerpt

Mr. Smith concedes that the young people interviewed in his study don't appear to be "dramatically less religious than former generations of emerging adults." It is traditionally a stage in life when, without parental guidance or child-rearing responsibilities, religious ties are loosened. But the period of emerging adulthood—between young people leaving home and their marrying and setting up a home of their own—is growing longer these days, because people marry later and remain financially dependent on their parents well into their 20s. The time without steady religious observance is thus prolonged as never before.

And the costs could be high. Not only does religion concentrate the mind and help young people to think about moral questions, it also leads to positive social outcomes. Religious young people are more likely to give to charity, do volunteer work and become involved with social institutions (even nonreligious ones). They are less likely to smoke, drink and use drugs. They have a higher age of first sexual encounter and are less likely to feel depressed or to be overweight. They are less concerned with material possessions and more likely to go to college.

So why are most emerging adults so morally unmoored and religiously alienated? Mr. Smith suggests that religious institutions haven't done a very good job at educating kids in even the most basic tenets of their faiths. And religious parents often shirk their duties, too, perhaps believing the "cultural myth" that they have no influence over their children once they hit puberty. Mr. Smith has found, to the contrary, that, when it comes to religious faith and practice, "who and what parents were and are" is more likely to "stick" with emerging adults than the beliefs and habits of their teenage friends.

Oddly, most of the respondents in Mr. Smith's study, despite their own drifting away from religious belief, say that they expect to be more observant when they reach full adulthood and that they plan to rear their own children in their faith tradition. One young college student who spends a lot of time drinking and smoking pot tells her interviewer: "I think you should give them that, kind of rear them in some religious direction."

—Ms. Riley is the Journal's deputy Taste editor.