The Protestant Citizen

Martin Harris

      Architect Martin Harris lives in Brandon, VT. He is a property rights and education advocate.

      Most Americans with a fair grasp of history (don’t test your recent high school grad on this) will remember Will Rogers, the Oklahoma native who twirled a lariat while discussing politics and inventing aphorisms before audiences in the 1930s and 1940s. “All I know is what I read,” said Rogers.

      I use the quote, with the “in the papers” part omitted, because I just finished some reading which, as frequently happens, illustrates something I hadn’t been smart enough to think up on my own. And it wasn’t in a newspaper; it was in Reason magazine. More precisely, it was in a Brian Doherty article discussing the anti-income-tax movement.

      Midway through his analysis of the 16th Amendment rebellion, which covers every base from the ratification-shortfall of the Amendment itself to hair-splitting over words like income and liability, Doherty describes its members thus:

They are serious people in general, with no sense of humor or irony, armed merely with the conviction that they are right.

      He continues:

The tax honesty people are staunch exemplars of America’s glorious Protestant heritage. This observation is not merely a pun on their status as tax protesters.

      Their attitudes toward the Constitution and the statutes and legal decisions regarding the income tax are uniquely Protestant, relying on a layman’s ability -- indeed obligation -- to read and study and parse the original documents himself, to come to his own personal relationship with the law and the cases, and to prefer his understanding to that of the priesthood of lawyers, judges, and accountants.

      The planning and zoning process (P&Z) should be based, as it once was, on rules which bind the government planners as much as the civilian planners, and that if it continues to be perceived by the citizenry as arbitrary, capricious, conditional, and unpredictable, P&Z will continue to be rejected by the voters who want rules they can read and understand for themselves.

      And where did this concept of the rules come from? Why, from an 18th century French aristocrat, one Charles de Secondat, a minor noble in the Bordeaux region of the Languedoc. He’s better known to Americans as the Baron de Montesquieu, and perhaps best known for his observation that “a government of laws, not of men” would be quite a bit better than the monarchy which, even as he wrote, was headed for its own demise for precisely that reason. His concepts of government -- rule of law, separation of powers into three branches, periodic elections, and so on -- were so attractive to America’s Founding Fathers that they were incorporated into the Philadelphia Constitution only a few years after his death in 1755.

      I knew all that, sort of. What I hadn’t appreciated, until reading the Doherty piece, was the link between the Protestant approach to faith and the republican approach to government: no interpreting intermediaries between the individual and the system. No selling of indulgences to citizens anxious to buy favor with the priesthood, no interpreting intermediaries to judge each P&Z application on its subjective merits (or not) and then to grant conditional approval (or not) as the spirit moves them. What’s remarkable about the Montesquieu concept of rule-of-law is that it was articulated by an aristocrat raised in an older religious tradition that is structured around multiple levels of intermediaries between the individual and the writ, and yet he, no less than Martin Luther, proposed and demanded a different way: a citizenship reformation, you might call it.

      The rule-of-law concept hasn’t survived unscathed from Montesquieu’s day to this: in small areas like P&Z, and in large areas like national security, we’re now at the mercy of government employees whose flexible interpretation of the rules from day to day trumps our own black-and-white reading. It’s difficult, any more, to be the Protestant citizen Montesquieu and Doherty write about; but it’s worth the effort. Consider the alternative.     *

“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense.”  -- Ralph Waldo Emerson