The Constitutional Structure of Disestablishment
[W]e have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality or religion. . . . Our Constitution is made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
—John Adams
The only tyrant I accept in this world is the still, small voice within.
—Mohandas Gandhi
Introduction: When President John Adams observed that our Constitution is ill equipped to govern the unbridled passions of an immoral people, he identified one of the fundamental problems confronting any democratic state: popular government depends upon popular virtue. That is, our democratic institutions rely on the service and participation of an informed citizenry committed to at least some shared vision of our national ideals and public goals. And yet, as a democracy, prominent among those national ideals is the belief that we are free to imagine and pursue personal conceptions of virtue without the coercive influence of a paternalistic state. So, while democracy depends upon a moral citizenry, the democratic state cannot coerce the public virtue necessary to its survival. Indeed, once coerced by a state, a virtuous act is no longer virtuous—it is simple obedience—and the state has robbed the citizen of the profound human experience of choosing virtue for its own sake. Thus, the problem of public virtue produces one of the central paradoxes of democratic government.
