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All publicity, it is said, even bad publicity, is good publicity. How much more so is it an honor for one who is not a scholar to be reviewed by Mark Noll, a wise and judicious historian from whose own writing I have always benefited-whatever he says about my book. In fact, Noll's review is an eminently fair account of A Free People's Suicide, though I would wish only to engage further with his three concluding reservations, or "unanswered questions."
First, Noll writes, "do the ideas and practices of the founders deserve such unqualified reverence?" Reverence for the founders is a slightly odd charge to level against an Englishman, especially when I have been a serious and longtime critic of civil religion, and several times in this very book I have clearly specified the founders' blind spots-on the one hand, their well-known flaws of character, and on the other hand, the egregious evil of their treatment of the slaves, Native Americans, and women. "Mr J," for instance, I have described bluntly as a hypo-crite of the first order. So to describe my treatment of the founders as viewing them on "absolute terms" is quite wrong and rather unfair.
That said, and I am glad Noll did not put me down with the advocates of "Christian America," I am always irked by the widespread practice of citing the founders' flaws and dismissing them entirely, as so many do today. For as a Eu-ropean, who has read as much as I can of the long-running debates over human freedom, I truly admire the founders' attempted solution to freedom's biggest challenge: the problem of how freedom is to be sustained. For all the current vogue for sustainability, contemporary American freedom-for example, in its libertar-ian forms-is quite unsustainable and the harvest of consequences is ripening fast. Yet most modern Americans either ignore or dismiss the founders' solution, which is...