If We Can Keep It
By Jayd Henricks
On September 17, 1787, as the delegates to the Constitutional Convention filed out of the Pennsylvania State House having just finished the most consequential document most of them would ever sign, a Philadelphia woman named Elizabeth Willing Powel stopped Benjamin Franklin and asked him a simple question: “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” Powel was not a passive bystander asking a casual question. She was one of the sharper political minds in the city, a woman whose drawing room had hosted half the men who had spent the last four months arguing about how human beings might govern themselves without a king. She knew the importance of her question. Franklin’s answer has outlived nearly everything else said that summer: “A republic, if you can keep it.”
Two hundred and fifty years later, as we mark the anniversary of the founding of the United States, Franklin’s answer still serves as an admonition. He did not say America had been given a republic, end of story. He said it had been given a republic conditionally—an inheritance that exists only as long as each generation does the work of keeping it.
Americans were given a democratic republic—not a democracy. America’s founders were suspicious of pure democracy, believing unchecked majority rule would be as oppressive as monarchy. They had read about ancient Athens’ democracy and feared the mob rule that had led to systemic instability, unjust executions, and misguided military campaigns. Our founding fathers trusted the average American, while also harboring concerns about his ability (and willingness) to be sufficiently informed on political matters. They were also anxious that minority rights be protected from a sometimes fickle will of the majority, which is part of what led to the Bill of Rights. After designing a series of checks and balances, they set up a system where citizens elect representatives to govern on their behalf. America’s founders considered a republic an ideal means of benefitting from popular government while avoiding its dangers.
This 250th anniversary is a moment to recognize the extraordinary achievement of the Founding generation, and of everyone since who has carried the American experiment forward. It is impossible to know exactly what the world would look like without their vision and their bravery, but it is reasonable to believe that tyranny would have prevailed more often and in more places, that the medical and technological advances we take for granted would in many cases still be fantasies, and that the basic freedoms of religion and speech, where they existed at all, would be far more muted. Poverty would be more widespread. Human dignity would be less protected, and less often even named as something requiring protection. We owe a real debt to those who built and sustained this country, and an anniversary like this is the right occasion to acknowledge that debt with something more than a casual nod. Sincere gratitude is the proper place to start.
None of that gratitude requires us to pretend the story is uncomplicated. No society is perfect, and American history is marked by real and serious failures to live up to its own ideals—slavery, abortion, and unnecessary wars chief among them, but hardly alone. Those failures are part of our history and shouldn’t be glossed over. Man is fallen, and so every society he builds will be fallen too. But it is not unreasonable to say that America has done as much as any nation in history to build institutions capable of recognizing human weakness and correcting for it over time: a constitutional structure designed to be amended rather than worshipped, a civic culture capable, however slowly and at however great a cost, of expanding its own sense of who counts as fully American, regardless of race, faith, or economic status. That capacity for honest self-correction, more than any claim to have gotten everything right from the start, is a major part of what is worth keeping.
This is also where Franklin’s answer deserves ongoing reflection, because when the line is reduced to a slogan, it is the verb that tends to get lost. He did not describe a republic as a possession—something handed down once and then simply held onto, the way you might hold onto an heirloom. He described it as something kept, continuously, the way a household is kept or a promise is kept: not a finished inheritance but an ongoing act. A republic survives not because a founding document declares that it will, but because enough citizens, generation after generation, take on the hard work self-government actually requires—forming themselves in virtue, restraining their own appetites, treating fellow citizens with whom they sharply disagree as fellow citizens rather than enemies to be defeated. The Constitution structures that effort. It cannot remove the need for it. It assumes a people already capable of supplying it themselves.
Every age has its dangers, but it is not unreasonable to think the threats facing the United States today are unusual, and unusually dangerous. America has shown itself remarkably capable, across two and a half centuries, of fighting off enemies from without. The graver threat today is from within. What defines a people is its shared ideals and its shared culture, and American culture is no longer much of a melting pot of peoples gathered around a common vision. It looks more like a Tower of Babel: a great many voices talking past one another, building competing and often incompatible visions of family, society, and the human person, with less and less shared vocabulary even to argue well. That confusion of tongues is not a minor cultural complaint to be attributed to another generational grievance. It comes close to an existential threat, because a republic that has lost the capacity to deliberate in a common language has lost the capacity to govern itself at all. It is not just our comfortable way of life that is at stake in getting this right. Given how much of the world has looked to the American experiment for the protection of basic human freedoms, it is a great deal more than that.
At the heart of American culture for nearly the whole of its history was a deep religious spirit—not a single creed established as the law of the land, but a widely shared confidence that there was a moral order prior to politics, and that rights came from somewhere beyond the state and so could not simply be revoked by it. It is primarily a faith in the Christian God, who acts in history and in our personal lives, that shaped the birth of our country.
The Founders were not naive about how much the American project depended on that conviction; they said so plainly, in their own voices, and we would do well to take their plain statements seriously rather than filing them away as pious decoration on an otherwise secular project. Washington devoted a substantial portion of his Farewell Address to the necessity of virtue and religion. “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity,” he wrote, “religion and morality are indispensable supports,” warning his countrymen that “reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” John Adams made the same case even more bluntly in a letter to the Massachusetts militia in 1798: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Neither man was arguing for an established church or a confessional state. Both were making a structural claim about what self-government, unique among forms of government, requires: citizens capable of governing themselves first, internally, before they’re asked to share in governing anyone else. Virtue is necessary for a self-governed people. That kind of internal discipline has not, as a matter of historical fact, sustained itself apart from religious formation. Subtract the formation derived from faith and you do not get a neutral, smoothly functioning secular republic in its place. You get citizens with all the same disordered appetites and none of the internal checks, governed by a document that assumes those checks are already there.
After all, the Declaration of Independence claims, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”—but there is truthfully nothing self-evident about them. These first principles are assumed, rather than defended, because Americans’ Christian beliefs undergirded them. They are “self-evident” when they flow naturally out of a Judeo-Christian worldview. Although Puritans, Anglicans, Lutherans, Methodists, Quakers, etc., including the few Catholics around at the time, disagreed about doctrinal content—they all shared assumptions about God, human nature, and morality that created a fairly consistent worldview (e.g., that there is a God; that rights stem from him and are therefore discovered, not created; that human nature is fixed; that life includes the right to make it out of the womb alive; that happiness means human flourishing, not the mere pursuit of pleasure, etc.). As Alexis de Tocqueville noted in Democracy in America, “The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other.” It is nearly impossible to make that same observation today.
If Babel is the right image for what is happening to American culture, it is worth remembering that Babel is not the only biblical story about many voices and confusion. At Pentecost, the apostles spoke to people gathered from a dozen different nations, all hearing in their own languages one true thing. The difference between the two stories is not the number of tongues involved. It is whether there is anything above the many voices capable of drawing them into a shared understanding without flattening their real differences into a forced sameness. An artificial unity—pretending we already agree about the things that matter most when we plainly do not—was never going to hold a country as large and as diverse as this one together. Pretending otherwise is its own quiet dishonesty.
What held America together, imperfectly but really, for most of its history, was a shared horizon above the disagreement: a sense, even among people who differed sharply on almost everything else, that some things were simply true, that the human person carried a dignity no vote could revoke, and that there was a judgment above every human judgment. Lose that horizon, and pluralism does not become peaceful. It becomes a Tower of Babel managed, for a while, by procedure and law enforcement—but not enough to hold a free people together for long.
Two hundred and fifty years on from the founding, and two hundred and thirty-nine years on from the afternoon Elizabeth Powel asked her question outside the Pennsylvania State House, the work Franklin described has not gotten any easier. It was never going to be finished by one generation on behalf of all the rest. Keeping a republic was never a task that could be outsourced to the Founders, or to the Constitution, or to anyone but the people actually living under it at any given moment. That includes us, now, with whatever particular dangers belong to our own moment rather than theirs. What we need now is to remember that our republic is not secure. It requires a virtuous people formed by faith. And for this reason, there is need to protect religious freedom and the place of churches in our culture. For without a religious foundation, our republic loses its foundation and will fall. There are signs that the foundation is already beginning to crack: less people going to church, fewer vocations to religious life, public ridicule of the faith, and a hyperfocus on politics over family and community.
If the United States is to flourish for another 250 years, it is up to people of faith to reclaim their role in our society. Franklin’s answer was never only about 1787. Every generation of Americans is charged with the responsibility, including the one currently raising children, casting votes, and deciding what it actually believes about God and the human person: a republic, or something else quietly wearing the same name? For the moment, we have a republic. Whether we get to keep it is still—as it always was—up to the current generation of Americans.
Jayd Henricks is the president of Catholic Laity and Clergy for Renewal. He served at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops for eleven years and holds a STL in systematic theology from the Dominican House of Studies. He has written extensively on the Church in America.