When challenged to write about culture, I immediately dashed off a screed about how a culture with bad theology inevitably ends up with bad anthropology; if we don’t see ourselves correctly in a cosmic sense, we’ll never see ourselves correctly in any other domain. This was not exactly uplifting holiday stuff, so I took my wife’s cool response as a suggestion I chose another topic. So here goes: I’m going to write about my peronsal culture. Tim Keller says that white people are the only people who think they have no culture; the way we do things is just the way things are supposed to be, and everybody else has a culture that sets them apart. He contends we do indeed have our own culture, and we just don’t know it. So I’d like to take a minute to explore what my culture might be, using my illustrious forebear, Roger Sherman, as an example.
I am Roger’s five times great grandson, through his second wife Rebecca. Roger was the only man to sign all five of the founding documents establishing the United States of America. Nobody else even signed four. He is less well known than the other founding fathers, although his role at the Constitutional Convention was rivaled only by James Madison. He served as a legislator, judge and mayor in Connecticut and in the new House of Representatives and Senate. His age, lack of elocution, and his role as legislator as opposed to executive have kept him hidden from political glory, but a case can be made that he was the most influential of all the founding fathers. He is known as the author of the Connecticut Compromise, and he was also the defining force behind the Bill of Rights.
This brings us to his influence on the culture of our nation today. Who was he, and what did he stand for? First and foremost, he was a Christian. He was a Calvinist and Puritan, in whichever order you would prefer those terms. Although I’m not a fan of Calvin in the most detailed aspects of his soteriology, Calvin nevertheless had a salubrious influence upon Mr. Sherman. Specifically, Roger shared Calvin’s dim view of human nature, and felt that human institutions, like the humans who made them, were subject to study, evaluation, and when found wanting, subject to rejection and change. Thus, a Christian could at one and the same time be a supporter of law and government, while at the same time being a revolutionary. Further, Roger saw that those who serve in government should do so in keeping with an interior morality based upon the absolutes conferred by Christian faith. He opposed the appointment of Gouverneur Morris to a post as legate to France because he was “irreligious and profane.” Roger thought that a man with a weak moral foundation could not be trusted in the affairs of state. He would be appalled at the attempts of modern scholarship to say that there is to be no cooperation between Church and state in the government of human affairs. In his day, there was an established church in Connecticut, and Roger handed down a sentence as judge against a man convicted of not attending church. The Federal government was not to establish a church, but states were both allowed and expected to. Scholars have preferred to interpret the Bill of Rights in keeping with the ruminations of Jefferson, who was in France while it was being written by Roger Sherman back in America! Roger was also far-sighted, knowing that short term political accommodation could bring long term humanitarian benefits that outweighed the immediate costs. Do what you can now, to bring about the ultimate goal you seek. He understood the shortcomings of the Articles of Confederation, and urged the adoption of an entirely new Constitution, though he was always a champion of states’ rights and an opponent of an overly powerful Federal government. Many of the excesses of modern government could be avoided if we would only listen to what Roger was saying during this period.
In all these areas we see Roger Sherman being an integrated individual. He was not a man rent asunder between body, mind and spirit, but rather one whose spirit informed his mind, and whose mind controlled his body. As such, he was a prime example of the kind of person who immigrated from Europe to the New World with the express intention of making a new life in a new land that was profoundly rational and correct. There was no distinction between secular and sacred; all was understood and appreciated in its proper time and place. I would like to think that I’m not only a heritor of his genome, but of his spiritual, intellectual and social views; in other words, his culture.
