M Stanton Evans author of the theme is freedom you start off saying you dedicated this book to the memory of your father. How come . What was the motivation . Well for one reason because he was my father, and a very good father. But also because many of the things that this book is about were things that i discussed with him many times. And about which i learned many things from him. So sort of for both of those reasons. Where did you live in the early days . I was born in texas and he was at that time he was for much of his life a College Professor and a teacher as was my mother who is still living. And very active by the way. And he was teaching at a Little School called texas a i in kingsville texas in 1934 before i was born. Then we moved before chattanooga tennessee, and he taught there at the university of chattanooga in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Then in world war ii he went in and he taught other schools as well. Then he went into the Atomic Energy commission when they were hiring at oakridge and became involved in a lot of political and official issues there which had not been his field before. He was a professor of english literature. And then after the war, they moved him and our family up here and he worked for the a. E. C. Here in washington. So my childhood was spent mostly in tennessee, then in this metro area up through the early 1950s. The reason i ask that your mom was a classic scholar. Yes. She studied greek and latin at the university of mississippi which is where my father met her. He had been teaching there. And as i say shes 86 years old shes still very active. She lives out here in lou din county in virginia. Course of doing this book about aspects of classical history and english history, of which shes quite a fan. So both my parents, each in his and her own way, contributed to this book. Cspan all right. Some of these names you know, we chatted just before we went on that i had to reach way back to the early days of education when youre starting to be taught locke and hume and descartes and all that. Whats the point of this book . Guest well, there are really two aspects of it that are sort of the epicenters of it. One is what is our tradition . What is the american political tradition . What does it consist of . Thats the first level of it. And the second level is where does it come from . Why do we have the tradition that we have . And the way that we are taught our history, the way i was taught it and, based on what you were saying before apparently the way you were taught it and, i think, a lot of other people, is that our freedoms are a secular product that they come out of the enlightenment, they come out of the period with the french revolution, when people rejected the authority of religion and set up institutions on a purely rational basis. And thats where you get your locke and your hume and your descartes and all of that, all of which sounds awfully academic and awfully irrelevant to current events. But it isnt, because much of what we see in our political debate today is about these very issues the whole controversy over prayer in the schools, to take something very current or the controversy about the socalled religious right or abortion or many other issues which involve religious questions or religious axioms. And the standard version of those issues is that, well religion should have nothing to do with our political system that our Founding Fathers meant to prohibit religion from the civil order, to keep it in the closet, if you have to have it all, but dont let it influence your politics. And that is a result of the way were taught our history, that our freedoms result from rejecting or sequestering our religious beliefs and setting up freedom on a purely rational basis. My argument in this book is thats all wrong and that, in point of fact, our freedom, to go back to my two levels of discussion, our tradition is a tradition of freedom and limited government, which is why ive chosen the title of the book. But, secondly, at the other level, those freedoms are based upon our religion first, in terms of the very ideas of freedom that we now take for granted and, secondly, in the evolution of the institutions of freedom, such as limited government, constitutionalism, government by consent, protection for the rights of the individual. All of these ideas grew out of our religious heritage, and thats basically what the book is about. Cspan i dont know if you can do this. Can you give us your personal political philosophy in a couple of sentences . Guest it will be tough. I am a conservative. I dont think thats any secret to cspan viewers. Ive been on here a number of times. But i mean by that very much the things i was just talking about im interested in conserving certain themes, not just because of the status quo in fact quite often ive been critical of the status quo at any moment but of conserving this tradition of freedom, of limited government, which is the tradition of the United States and the tradition of western culture generally. I think thats what conservatism means, and because i believe in those values of freedom, im a conservative, because thats what im trying to conserve. Cspan go back to the Founding Fathers the madison washington, Jefferson Group and who in that group would best reflect what you think today . Or who would you look to for guidance . Guest well, its hard to pick any one of the founders. They were all so good and all so wise, and its amazing how wise and good they were. If you consider that at that time this country had a population of less than three million people, and yet there must have been 300 people of the very first rank at that time who were very learned scholars of these matters, who were very good, wise statesmen, who understood this tradition that im talking about and basically established the institutions that made that tradition live in america under our constitution. So it would be tough to pick any one, but certainly john adams; james madison, i think represents the center of that; but i would include jefferson. Im a very strong jeffersonian in many ways; aspects of hamilton and, of course, jefferson and hamilton were supposed to be opposed, but in many ways they were not opposed washington, Patrick Henry sam adams, james otis, roger sherman. That group and i refer to all of them, as you know, many times in the book represented this consensus of ideas i was just discussing. Cspan you have a footnote in here, and im trying to find it because i underlined it a breakdown on all the religions that the Founding Fathers belonged to. Were they all religious people . Guest no, not all of them. And, of course, being religious means Different Things to different people. The footnote to which you refer is a calculation by a man named w. W. Sweet, who was a scholar of these matters, who looked at the formal religious affiliations of the Founding Fathers. And this goes, again, to the question of the way were taught our history and maybe it would be useful, if i might, just to mention what i think is the conventional view, which is that the founders were skeptics deists. Cspan what is a deist . Guest a deist is something a voltaire, for example, was a deist someone who believes that there was a creator, hat the world was created at some point by god, who then just let it run of its own accord. And a deist, therefore technically would be someone who does not believe in a providential god, a god who intervenes in history, a god that cares about what happens to you and me; simply a first cause. Cspan for instance, you say in the book that George Washington was thought to be a deist by some. Guest it has been said that he was a deist. Cspan yeah. Guest some people said that george mason was a deist, and i say we dont know. Tocqueville said some years later, 1835, that no one can search the human heart who knows how sincere these professions were. But if you go by their public statements, go by their institutions, then these people were believing christians on their statements and on the institutions that they established. And just to come back to what sweets calculations showed, he showed most of them, i think, were members of the church of england, some presbyterians, congregationalists, methodists two roman catholics. Cspan two quakers. Guest two quakers, John Dickinson being the one that everyone knows about. And many other researchers have shown the same thing. But the formal Church Affiliations dont tell you a lot. I have a note, also, there from daniel bushton, i think, who points out that, of the more than 100 members of the virginia what was in essence was their Constitutional Convention in 76, although it wasnt really a Constitutional Convention, that only three out of more than 100 were not vestrymen of the church of england. And in virginia, in that day vestrymen were basically the people who ran the society. The whole the church and the political system of virginia were run by vestrymen of the church of england. Cspan how long did you work on this book . Guest about 30 years. Well, and i say that somewhat jokingly, but really the reading and thought of 30 years have gone into it. The writing of it took about a year. Cspan thats the longest number of years ive ever gotten in answer to that question. If i saw you in your environment and had all around you the books that were required to write this, to help you write this what would i see . Guest youd see a lot of books, and indeed, people in my office did see a lot of books because they were thats exactly kind of the way i worked. They were stacked up all over the place. You would see lots of books that arent even mentioned in the bibliography. For example, i talk about jefferson quite a bit in there and hes an interesting study in terms of the religious aspect of this, but just on the political aspect, i quote him quite a bit and jeffersons works and the memorial edition are 20 volumes big, thick volumes. Those were a little cumbersome to i own that, and i have them in my apartment, but i dont lug them around with me. Cspan do you read all that . Guest ive not read every word. There would be, in those volumes, about 10,000 pages just of jefferson. Ive pro in all candor, ive read maybe half of them and have reread a lot of them. But what i did in trying to keep it manageable and also to give citations that people could easily follow up was to take for example, the Modern Library edition of jefferson, which in most cases is is adequate for the purpose. In some cases, it isnt. And i referred to those books in the bibliography, the ones that people can easily get to. So but it would be a lot of books, hundreds, thousands, i guess, of books. Cspan how about documents . I mean, theres a chapter on the magna charta, for instance. How many of those kinds of documents do you cite did you need to go back and read . The declaration of independence, the constitution, what else . Guest well, the text of documents, like magna charta mayflower compact, the declaration of independence, are readily available in any number of books, so i did not make any effort to go back and look at an original version, although one could do that. What was more difficult and in the chapter on prayer and the First Amendment is to find records of the congress for example, the first congress, in which madison presented the bill of rights in june of 1789. This is not readily available, and so what i did was to go to the library of congress and there is the version of the congressional record of that day called gales and seatons, which is available from the library of congress, and got xeroxes of the actual debate on the First Amendment throughout the summer of 1789 up to the time of the passage of the First Amendment in september of 89. And thats much more difficult to come by. So thats the kind of where i had anything original to deal with, it was really of that nature. Other books are very hard to find. I refer in there to a document called the vindiciae Foreign Language spoken , which was the manifesto of the huguenots of france in 1579, which is virtually a declaration of independence but 200 years earlier. And that is almost impossible to find, even though it has been commercially published. And i spent several years tracking down a copy of that book. You go through these bookfinding agencies and so on, and i finally got a copy of it many years ago, but it took me several years to get it. Sweets book that we were talking about earlier was almost impossible to find, and a book finder got it for me after a long search. Im not a rare book person. Im not trying to look at and handle the original documents, but im a journalist, and so im trying to get the information. And in many cases, its very hard to get, because the conventional history is not interested in these things. And you can read many a history of our founding or of social contract and the vindiciae is in i talk about the vindiciae in the chapter on social contracts you read a lot about locke under social contract, but you wont read much about the vindiciae. It might be mentioned, but its never quoted or given in full. Or you wont read very much about the covenantal theology of the people that founded Plymouth Colony or Massachusetts Bay or connecticut. So i had a lot of searching to do to find the texts of these documents. And theyre not originals, but nonetheless, theyre obscure hard to find. Cspan what would you like to hear somebody say, after theyve read your book, in a conversation . You just come across and you hear them say, i just read stan evans book, and i learned the following. Guest well, i think i would like to hear them say, i didnt know that, and i needed to know that, and because i read this book, i now do know it. Cspan what, though . Guest that the pedigree of our freedoms is not hostile to our religious faith, but a product of our religious faith. That is basically what the book contends. Cspan why did you want to prove that . Guest i didnt set out wanting to prove it. I set out trying to find out. And, again, its the mentality of the journalist, of what are the facts . And i had been taught this liberal History Lesson, as i call it, or conventional History Lesson, just as we all were. And in pursuing that, i kept running into dead ends. I wanted to know i came of age at the height of the cold war, where our freedoms one of the first things that really ignited my interest in politics and government was listening, when i was 14 years old, to a radio dramatization of George Orwells 1984. Cspan where were you then . Guest i was in high school in prince georges county, right outside of washington Mount Rainier high school in prince georges county, maryland. If you go out rhode island avenue, youd run into Mount Rainier, maryland. And i well remember listening to that, and it was a very frightening thing to hear what was going on in this fictionalized version of a totalitarian state. And i remember talking about this and i got the book. I read 1984. And i remember giving a book report on it in my high school class, and my teacher said well, thats just fiction. Its not real. Well, what do i know . And then i remember reading, shortly thereafter, a Readers Digest condensation of an article about cardinal menzenti, who was the hungarian catholic cardinal, who had been captured by the communist government of hungary and tortured, and many of the tortures to which he was subjected were very similar to those orwell describes in 1984. And i remember marching back into my class, saying, you said this wasnt real, and yet this is the same thing, and this is not fiction. And that made me wonder would our society go that way, would we end up in the straits, which is what orwells vision was, that the whole world would be ruled by totalitarian powers . I was just a kid. I didnt know anything, really and so i then went to college and studied some of these things and ran into these same questions. And the main question was where does our freedom come from . Why do we have it . Why is this system free and other systems not free . And the answers i was receiving in college in the classes i took were not satisfactory. They would keep talking about the renaissance, which is Something Else i mention just in passing in the book, but if you read the histories of renaissance, this was not a period of freedom. It was another period of torture and despotic government. One of them one of the most famous books on the renaissance, by John Addington symonds, is called the age of the desperates, which is a title i borrowed for my chapter on totalitarianism. And i kept running into this roadblock that, when you tried to track where freedom came from, the conventional history didnt provide the answers. And so over the years and thats why i say it took 30 years im 60 years old now, and ive been noodling with these things at least since i was 30 and maybe earlier. And thats why i wrote the book cspan where did you go to college . Guest i went to yale. Cspan what did you study . Guest i studied english literature, and then i did some graduate work in economics at New York University after i got out of yale. Cspan what did you do after college . Guest i became a journalist. If youre an english major and you want to make a living, there are only really two ways to do it. One is to teach english, which i didnt want to do and dont think i would have done very well; the other is to become a journalist. So i went into journalism and worked on a number of magazines and then went out to indianapolis and worked on the paper out there. Cspan when did you leave . You were the editor there. Guest yes, well, i didnt go. Cspan indianapolis news. Guest . Out there as the editor, but i became the editor, which meant editor of the editorial page. Cspan and i can remember growing up in that state and you were the youngest editor of any major daily in the United States. Guest well