QUOTE: Whale Through a Net

SOURCE:  Dreher, Rod. The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation (pp. 36-37). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
KEYWORDS:  Law vs. Faith, culture, society, religion, restraint, self-government, freedom,

In a letter to soldiers in 1798, John Adams, a Founding Father and practicing Unitarian, remarked:

We had no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

Adams understood that liberty under the Constitution could only work if the people were virtuous, restraining their passions and directing them toward the good—as defined, presumably, by Adams’s rationalistic religious belief. Fortunately, having gone through the First Great Awakening of the mid-eighteenth century, America was strongly Evangelical, and citizens had a strong shared idea of the Good and a shared definition of virtue. Unfortunately, this would not last.