One Nation Under Our Godless Constitution, Article II ...

In"One Nation Under Our Godless Constitution," I suggested that Brook Allen's"Our Godless Constitution" The Nation, 21 February 2005, found crucial support for a secular reading of our national origins in Article 11 of the Treaty of Tripoli, adopted in 1797. It said:

As the Government of the United States...is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion--as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity of Musselmen--and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

Commenting on this passage from the Treaty, Allen observed that:

This document was endorsed by Secretary of State Timothy Pickering and President John Adams. It was then sent to the Senate for ratification; the vote was unanimous. It is worth pointing out that although this was the 339th time a recorded vote had been required by the Senate, it was only the third unanimous vote in the Senate's history. There is no record of debate or dissent. The text of the treaty was printed in full in the Philadelphia Gazette and in two New York papers, but there were no screams of outrage, as one might expect today.

I disagreed with much of Allen's article. Underlying our founding documents is a long history of wisdom about human nature and human communities that led the founders to insist on a mixed system of checks and balances. Among other things, that wisdom traces back through a Calvinist sense of governance and human obligation to a biblical sensibility about human nature. Having said that, it still seems to me that the unanimous adoption of this language by the United States Senate in 1797 is remarkable and important to recall. It seems unthinkable that it might be adopted without objection in today's Senate.

But over at Spinning Clio, Marc did what historians do. He looked at the historical context in which the Treaty was adopted and found a little more complicated picture. He summarizes his findings in"Christianity as a ‘Founding Religion' Disavowed: What DID the 1796 Treaty Say (and when did it say it)?" Marc's findings are interesting. First, although Article 11 clearly was a part of official published versions of the Treaty of Tripoli, he sees some reason to doubt whether it was a part of the Treaty as it was submitted to the Senate in 1797. Secondly, even if it were a part of the Treaty as adopted by the Senate and signed by President Adams, he sees it as a placating assurance to north African rulers in order to achieve practical results in the release of American captives and the resumption of trade in the Mediterranean.

One of Marc's interesting findings is that the surviving Arabic version of the Treaty of Tripoli does not include the language cited above in the official versions of the Treaty as published in English. Rather, in the surviving Arabic version of the Treaty of Tripoli, Article 11 is"actually a letter, mostly gibberish, from the bey of Algiers to the ruler of Tripoli." It is otherwise described as"a letter, crude and flamboyant and withal quite unimportant, from the Dey of Algiers to the Pasha of Tripoli."* What Marc doesn't see, I think, is that, if the language of the published English version of the Treaty's Article 11 doesn't appear in the only surviving Arabic copy of the Treaty, that undermines his claim that the language is there only to assuage the Muslim rulers of north Africa. It appears to me that there's need for additional research on the subject.

* In fairness to Marc, neither of these characterizations of Article 11 in the surviving Arabic version of the Treaty of Tripoli is his own. The prejudicial language is from old secondary sources.