Foundationalism

Kirk Cameron is a funny guy. He was a very successful actor on a popular sitcom, unintentionally makes LOL-worthy memes or recently made a film about rescuing the true meaning of Christmas... for consumerism. 

However, I recently discovered that the minister and activist made some serious insight that will help his fellow conservatives out of an interpretive problem. It's not the interpretive problem of discrediting evolution while worrying about diseases going airborne or claiming that while the Confederacy put white supremacy in its charter, the Civil War was only incidentally about slavery.

It's the problem of the founding fathers. Conservatives from jokesters like Sarah Palin to intellectuals like Newt Gingrich consistently argue that the Enlightenment Deists who wrote the Declaration and the Constitution were actually orthodox Christians who thought the state should always reflect the character of that tradition, at least that tradition as it appeared at the end of the 19th century.

Cameron's movie Monumental about a Puritan statue in Massachusetts effectively elides the discourses of the 17th-century pilgrims with the democratic patriarchs in 1776. The way he uses the term, the Puritans were the founders, and the terms can be used synonymously.

Indeed, if we want to think of the US as pious, homogeneous state always looking outward at its enemies as some conservatives imagine, we have to think of Plymouth colony, not the Philadelphia of libertines like Ben Franklin. Though, the collectivist and anti-consumption tendencies of that first WASP nest are probably more of a problem for Cameron's friends than the are a help.

Cameron's move also opens up the term "founders" to encompass more of the "original" characters of the settler-colonists that have had lasting influence in American history. We could see foundations in the educated Catholic elite in Maryland, the prison colony in Georgia, and perhaps most importantly, Atlantic slavery, with its impact on the musical-literary tradition that has perhaps done the most to shape American culture as it is marketed and understood in the world today as well as its shaping the world economic order.

Of course, the problem with the historical views of many Americans of most political persuasions is the obsessive focus on the founders themselves, by whatever understanding. While many religious traditions tend to venerate single father-figures, it is not clear that states or other political communities should do so.

In modern history, has not the extolling of the fathers of nations tended to signify troubled political climates rather than steady ones?

Of course, America's singular deference to its Constitution is the result of classical liberal sensibilities enduring in our politics rather than the cause of it. Nevertheless, I think our contemporary preoccupation with its fundamentals and the intentions and assumptions of its writers needs some new scrutiny.

I'm probably not alone in wanting a story with a general opening of the idea of foundation and an appreciation of how exemplary figures or texts are reworked in deliberative change. That would represent something different, whether in a film about something set in stone or not.