As John Adams Knew, We Must Hold To Received Traditions

Jefferson wrote of “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” in his ringing declaration which still speaks to our hearts.  But what these Laws of Nature are is a matter of considerable debate. Jefferson professed the watchmaker God of the...

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Jefferson wrote of “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” in his ringing declaration which still speaks to our hearts.  But what these Laws of Nature are is a matter of considerable debate.

Jefferson professed the watchmaker God of the Deists. God has crafted a perfect instrument in the universe, and its laws reveal themselves to us as we apply ourselves to their study. It follows for him that the universe should be studied before Scripture, as it reveals its own workings to reason just as a machine reveals the physical laws underlying its own engineering. Accordingly, he insisted that children not be allowed to study the Bible until they had mastered reason through the study of history and science. He wrote:

Instead, therefore, of putting the Bible and Testament in the hands of the children at an age when their judgements are not sufficiently matured for religious inquiries, their memories may here be stored with the most useful facts from Grecian, Roman, European, and American history.

Jefferson certainly did not express reverence for Scripture as received law, for to him, law did not need to be received through a handoff from one generation to the next. Ideally, it could and should be derived directly from Nature. Thus, no one tradition could claim support of the State, and Jefferson accordingly was a powerful advocate for religious freedom. Religion was essentially a private affair and thus properly had nothing to do with the public and coercive affair which is law. (READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin: Judges Hold the Integrity of Our Legal System in Their Hands)

Jefferson’s point of view allied him temperamentally with the French revolutionaries as it already had with the French philosophes. The English constitutional concept had failed, he thought, corrupted by those in hereditary positions of power so that it excluded 90 percent of the people from the vote. He was deeply concerned with the problems of the “dead hand of the past,” unreasonable reliance on tradition which ultimately is unnecessary for law, as laws are derivable from Nature itself and no tradition is necessary.

Ultimately, Jefferson censured Britain for the corruption of the English Common Law by “pious copyists” who had added Jewish law onto it. This fraud, he felt, was furthered by English judges who “could be accused of deliberately if piously avoiding the truth,” in the words of historian Trevor Colbourn. And although Jefferson stood for the religious freedom of Jews and was an effective and constant advocate for it, he had contempt for Jewish tradition and law, which he expressed many times. Judaism’s insistence on public law revealed from God was antithetical to his entire way of thinking. He identified Judaism with his hated political opponents, the Federalists, whom he deemed were “marked, like the Jews, with such a perversity of character.”

Yet for all that, Jefferson, engaged in a famous extended correspondence with the last Federalist president, John Adams, after they both had served in the White House. Adams shared the views of Edmund Burke about the French Revolution and the murderous excesses of what it did in the name of the Religion of Reason espoused by its bloodiest and most tyrannical elements. Adams insisted that religion was necessary to ground the state in morality, that science depended on moral teachings preceding them. He did not believe that people would automatically derive law from speculation, but rather needed to internalize the moral imperative passed down from parent to child, as modeled in Hebrew Scripture.

In response to Jefferson’s criticism of Judaism, Adams wrote:

I will insist that the Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation … preserv[ing] and propagat[ing] to all mankind the doctrine of a supreme, intelligent, wise, almighty sovereign of the universe, which I believe to be the great essential principle of morality and all civilization.

Adams stood for natural law no less than Jefferson, but it was of another kind, a kind which saw law as being passed down and cherished, home by home, family by family, in the model set out in Deuteronomy’s command to “teach them to your children.” He displayed a passing familiarity with post-Biblical Jewish literature and saw the continuous passing-on of covenantal law as the foundation upon which our own Constitution was built. In this, he embraced the law traditions which he had absorbed through the writings of Sir Matthew Hale, which he had in turn received from his mentor, the extraordinary Common Lawyer and rabbinic scholar, John Selden. Adams knew that Jefferson had criticized Hale for being corrupted by religious tradition. Adams stood for Hale and Selden and their understanding of law against Jefferson’s.

The basic principle that Selden identifies is that of fidelity to our agreements. Our lives reflect a series of choices to govern ourselves in coordination with and in response to others who enter into such a self-governed mode of living with us. These covenants admit of organic change, much as a ship, even though its boards have been replaced through the years till hardly a single original board remains, is still called by the same name it had at the beginning. It is that same ship.

So, Selden taught, are our laws, as best exemplified by the three-thousand-year continuity of Jewish law, but whose teachings, propagated throughout the world in Scripture, serve as a model for all other legitimate law systems, each reflecting the genius of its own people.

This natural process is not at odds with revelation. This is also a way to understand Jefferson’s phrase “Nature’s God.” And it has the great advantage of not being so easily perverted as the claims of reason were by Robespierre and his gang in order to justify their Terror.

Or, we might add, to justify the enslavement of a race of human beings on the “reasonable” assertion of a scientifically established superiority. Perhaps a firmer sense of immutable received law, such as motivated Jefferson’s British contemporary, William Wilberforce, might have kept Jefferson more faithful to his own vision of slavery necessarily dying out in the light of equality of man asserted by him on behalf of the nation as a whole.

But Jefferson would be the last to claim infallibility for any human, nor of exempting himself in theory of the possibility of human failure. It is hard to think of America without his contribution.

John Adams certainly held Jefferson in the highest esteem. His last words, recorded by his son, were, “Thomas Jefferson survives.”

Yet it may be that in this age of wokeism, in which reason has been employed to destroy civilization and the culture that enables it, we may see that Adams’ vision was clearer in decrying our need to temper our emotions with received traditions and to reject decisively the antisemitism that is so frequent a companion of tyranny.

Adams no less than Jefferson stood for reason. More than Jefferson, though, he saw that without faithfulness to our ancient covenants, reason evades us and morphs into mere rationalizations. As he wrote: “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” (READ MORE: Welcome to Venezuela, America)

People who take self-government seriously hold themselves to covenants beyond their ability to change at whim. We use the measure we saw used by those who came before, which prepared them to teach us. We use it ourselves and teach those who, seeing us, will learn how to carry it on themselves.

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