Exodus and America

In Federalist #1, Alexander Hamilton famously declares that the nascent American nation faces the task of answering a timeless political question: “whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.” The best of the American political tradition has spent more than two centuries answering Hamilton’s query by elevating choice and rejecting accident and force.  

This year marks America’s 250th anniversary. University centers for Civic Education are beginning to host their earliest cohorts of students. Reforms to K-12 reading instruction have demonstrated great progress in poor states. Around the country, legislatures have moved to ban phones in schools. The tie that binds these disparate things is this: Now is the right time to think deeply about how to best educate American students. The American project can only long thrive if the American people are committed to preserving republican government. Commitment alone, though, is not enough. The people must also have the right tools to accomplish this difficult task.  

To contribute to the specific nation that is the United States, citizens must understand truths about human life that cut deeper than any one regime. To succeed in the art of politics, one must have command of the timeless and the present. One must understand the universal and the parochial. The pursuit of this type of knowledge is the goal of a course (called Perennial Problems in Civic Thought) I taught this semester at The School of Civic Leadership at The University of Texas. My students and I began the term reading Exodus and then turned to the excellent Founding God’s Nation by Leon Kass. We next worked through Michael Walzer’s Exodus and Revolution. The book of Exodus is perhaps the most influential political text in the history of the West, yet it is often overlooked in even elite programs of study.  

Of the many pieces of wisdom contained in Exodus, three stand out as especially important for young Americans today. First, that self-government relies on virtue. Second, institutionalism is the antidote to personalist politics. Third, the natural consequences (good or bad) of one’s actions cannot be avoided.  

Virtue is the Heart of Republican Government 

Benjamin Franklin’s line, “A republic, if you can keep it,” resonates powerfully with thoughtful Americans because it cuts to the heart of the Constitution. The particular legal arrangements that come to mark the American system rely on intellectual commitments that can only be sustained through broadly dispersed virtue. Walzer notes that both Franklin and Jefferson proposed that the Great Seal of the United States feature imagery from Exodus. Franklin wanted to see Moses, staff raised, presiding over the Red Sea as its waves crashed onto Pharaoh’s army. Jefferson preferred pillars of cloud and fire. What underlies the founders’ attraction to the Exodus story? Walzer puts it this way: “The Exodus is a journey forward–not only in time and space. It is a march toward a goal, a moral progress, a transformation.” The American founders sought to build something new and yet hoped to do it with the wisdom of the old. Of course, this moral zeal is sometimes used by unsavory revolutionaries. Indeed, Walzer’s book devotes significant attention to this fact. 

What Exodus provides to violent utopians, though, it supplies even more profoundly to the American republican order. An insistence on virtue as the lifeblood of American life ties together the thinking of John Adams, Alexis de Tocqueville, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Dwight Eisenhower, to name a few examples. That an educated and morally sound citizenry is required for successful self-government is not an original American insight. Rather, our national contribution has been to audaciously attempt to put this principle into practice. The founding generation gave us no other bet to make. Exodus, in this light, deserves a place in the pantheon of American civic education. Nowhere else in the Western tradition do we see as stark a story of national birth. That both the Old Testament Israelites and the American founders brought to life a peculiar regime founded chiefly on virtue and law renders Exodus indispensable in understanding America’s political DNA.  

Institutional, not Personalist Politics  

The Israelites, once liberated, have only begun their political journey. They must learn not only to desire a better physical life, but to strive for true freedom. Kass and Walzer both argue that this freedom, in the first place, is the ability to live well and in accord with the conditions that allow for human flourishing. The text does not leave the story in the ethereal realm. Jethro (the father-in-law of and advisor to Moses) insists that a new leadership class be raised if the project of liberation is to become one of nationhood. Moses is a mortal, and his capacities are finite. He might be a Washington or a Lincoln, but he is not a demi-god. When, on occasion, he seems proud of his power, he displays a temptation to the Pharaonic. He sees, at Jethro’s behest, that he must deputize judges to handle day-to-day governance. In addition to ensuring these new officials have proper legal training, they must be morally fit. Jethro charges Moses with choosing “out of all the people able men, such as fear God, men of truth, hating covetousness; and place such over them, to be rulers of thousands, and rulers of hundreds, rulers of fifties, and rulers of tens.” (Exodus 18: 21, King James Version) 

Self-governance is hard work. It requires competence and excellence at every level of society. It needs not only men of skill, but those who possess the right interior disposition. Fortitude, loyalty, and responsibility are not negotiable if society is to prosper. No person and no political arrangement are perfect, of course. There is a cynical streak in America today that cites a lack of public virtue as a reason to abandon its pursuit. It is easy enough to find hypocritical and even scandalous behavior from elected officials. The right response to this reality is to return to the valorization of virtue. Political perfection is not achievable, but that is not the goal. The American republic depends on an anti-utopian way of seeing the world matched with a widespread commitment to goodness and self-sacrifice.  

Natural Consequences 

As the American folk song “God’s Gonna Cut You Down” (best experienced in Johnny Cash’s powerful version) puts it:  

You may throw your rock, hide your hand,  

workin’ in the dark against your fellow man 

But as sure as God made black and white 

What’s down in the dark will be brought to the light 

The admonition is one best applied inwardly. The listener is exhorted to remember that there is no way to do evil without avoiding its consequences. This insight is a pillar of the Judeo-Christian moral imagination. On the surface, this way of thinking might look breezy. There is a temptation to interpret this wisdom as a bit of earthly comfort. The right lesson is more profound. Here, a return to the Kass commentary on Exodus is useful. Kass invites the reader to consider why The Decalogue (what we normally call The Ten Commandments) concludes with guidance about each person’s inner life, rather than outward conduct alone. 

A man who covets what is his neighbor’s suffers, whether he knows it or not, from multiple deformations of his own desire. Not content with his own portion of good things, he cannot see them in their true light: as means to–and participants in–a higher way of life.

A person who focuses his energy on wanting what rightly belongs to another does himself harm, even if no one realizes it. The damage is so serious, in fact, that the perpetrator-victim does not even need to be aware of the bad effect for it to be real. The damage is not done to the self alone, though. Kass puts it this way: “My children and my children’s children are at risk from any iniquity I commit, but endless generations will benefit from the good I may do.”   

Self-government requires individual self-mastery. Here, we must be especially honest with students. It is not only their country that will depend on their virtue, but their families, friends, and neighborhoods. The wicked sometimes prosper for a time, yes. The good guys do not always win. Yet these realities exist alongside a deeper truth. Not one of us can outrun the natural consequences of our actions, good or bad. The Exodus narrative shows all of this in striking ways.  

Pharaoh is rich and powerful, yet his own selfishness leads to his demise. The Egyptian midwives who saved the life of baby Moses have no earthly power, yet the text tells us that God blesses them for their heroism in the face of an evil ruler who has issued an evil command. If we want our nation to prosper over the next 250 years, there is no better place to start than by teaching our students that the choices they make each day will shape their own destiny and that of the people they love most.  

Conclusion 

What ought we do to take heed of these timeless laws of the human condition? There are two things those of us training the next generation of American civic leaders should take to heart. The first, and most important, is to live our lives well. We are each imperfect, but our intellectual credibility depends on our moral example. Students do not see all parts of our lives, but they will be attentive to whether we are striving to implement the virtues we are asking them to take seriously. Second, we should place Exodus in the canon of our curriculum. Students should understand the outsized role the story has played in the American and Western political traditions. They should also be given the gift and challenge of grappling with this text in their intellectual community. Students, like the Israelites, are on a linear journey. When they graduate and full adulthood, they will need the deepest reserve of fortitude we can give them. Their families, states, and nation will depend on them leading self-sacrificial and morally serious lives. There is no better place to start than reading the Exodus story.  

John Kitch II is Assistant Professor of Instruction and Assistant Director of Academic Experience in the School of Civic Leadership at the University of Texas.