Iain McLean: Learning lessons from the US model

MORE and more people are coming to realise how extraordinary the Scottish Enlightenment was. In 1697, the year that Edinburgh student Thomas Aikenhead was hanged for blasphemy, Scotland had been in the grip of religious war, on and off, since 1560. Whoever was temporarily in control thought he had the monopoly of religious truth, and therefore had a God-given right to kill his enemies in various grisly ways.

By 1759 Adam Smith had published his Theory of Moral Sentiments. His close (and openly non-Christian) friend, David Hume, who had written his fundamental Treatise of Human Nature in France, had returned to Edinburgh to publish his Essays Moral and Political there in 1742. The arrival of Charles Edward Stuart in 1745 was a rude shock for Edinburgh intellectuals, whose militia failed to keep him out.

Despite that rude shock, Edinburgh had moved from dark theocracy to Athens of the North in only two generations. Nobody has ever convincingly explained how Scotland changed so far, so fast. Like Adam Smith, I suspect that the Union of 1707 played a big role. It made rapid economic growth possible.

Even more importantly, it removed the state from the side of the Church. There were still people who wanted to kill those who disagreed with them, but they lost the power to have them hanged at the Tolbooth.

Like Hume, Smith was almost certainly not a Christian. But they were both close students of the relationship between Church and state. One of their friendly disagreements crossed the Atlantic. In the USA, Smith won the argument, and his view is embodied in the US Constitution. In England, Hume sort of won: there remains an established Church, for which Hume argued tongue-in-cheek.

The disagreement originates with an aside in the volume on the Tudors in Hume's History of England, published in 1759: "(T]his interested diligence of the clergy is what every wise legislator will study to prevent; because in every religion, except the true, it is highly pernicious, and it has even a natural tendency to pervert the true by infusing into it a strong mixture of superstition, folly and delusion.

Each ghostly practitioner, in order to render himself more precious and sacred in the eyes of his retainers, will inspire them with the most violent abhorrence of all other sects… And in this manner ecclesiastical establishments, though commonly they arose at first from religious views, prove in the end advantageous to the political interests of society."Don't you just love that "except the true"? Hume's argument is that the state, in the shape of Henry VIII, had good reason for taking control of the Church, in order to make sure that the "ghostly practitioners" did not cause trouble. In his Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, Smith quotes this passage from his friend, whom he calls "by far the most illustrious philosopher and historian of the present age". He nonetheless disagrees vigorously:

The interested and active zeal of religious teachers can be dangerous and troublesome only where there is, either but one sect tolerated in the society, or where the whole of a large society is divided into two or three great sects… but that zeal must be altogether innocent where the society is divided into two or three-hundred, or perhaps into as many as a thousand small sects, of which no-one could be considerable enough to disturb the public tranquillity.

The Wealth of Nations is all about the advantages of free trade. Smith argues that free trade in religion is as valuable as free trade in anything else.

Smith was described as "very zealous in American affairs", advising British ministers in a tone of wry detachment that the rebellious colonies should be made to pay for their own defence; and (almost uniquely in Britain) that American independence would be no loss for Great Britain.

The tone of his remarks on America in the Wealth of Nations made him no friends there, and he was never quoted at the Convention that drafted the US Constitution in Philadelphia in 1787. Nevertheless, his books were closely read there.

One of his closest readers was James Madison from Virginia, often called the "Father of the US Constitution" (actually, there were many). With his friend Thomas Jefferson, Madison sponsored the overthrow of state support of religion in the Virginia Assembly. His Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments (1785) is clearly derived from Adam Smith.

Madison repeated these arguments twice in 1787: first in Vices of the Political System of the United States, which was a briefing note for the Virginia delegation to the Constitutional Convention; and then in the celebrated Federalist No 10.

The Federalist Papers were published in the New York newspapers by Madison and Alexander Hamilton to try to persuade New Yorkers to ratify the Constitution. Madison had to write No 10 in a hurry because the press date was on him.So he quickly adapted his arguments about faction to apply to political as well as religious factions.

Worried by the tyranny of the majority, Madison argued that, in an "extended republic" such as the USA, it could not arise because there was no group - neither political nor religious - that could form a majority in the whole republic. Smith's two- or three-hundred sects were already to be found in the new republic, as they still are.

The ratification of the Constitution, which required nine states to approve, was a close-run thing. Several states said they were unwilling to ratify it unless a Bill of Rights were added to protect individual freedoms against the state.

In the first session of the US House of Representatives in 1789-90, Madison became floor manager for the Bill of Rights. As finally passed, reconciling the versions sought by the House and the Senate and ratified by the states, the Bill of Rights comprises the first ten amendments to the US Constitution.

Perhaps the most important is the First Amendment, which opens: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

For more than 200 years, the First Amendment has protected religious freedom and prevented religious tyranny. It creates what Jefferson called a "wall of separation" between Church and state. Public life in the USA is vastly the better for it.

It would be vastly better for the UK also. Here we have 26 bishops from just one of the UK's hundreds of sects - the established Church of England - who sit in the House of Lords with the power to make laws affecting everybody. By what right do they sit there? Earlier this year, in the course of a Lords speech demanding the right of the Church of England to continue to discriminate against women and gays in the Church, the Bishop of Winchester casually denied the right of Quakers and two other small sects to conduct civil partnerships on their premises.

On that occasion the bishops won the first battle, but lost the second. The Equality Act 2010 will now allow those sects which wish to conduct civil partnerships to do so, while not forcing those which do not want to. It is the right solution: but if the UK had a First Amendment the battle would not have to be fought over and over again.

The First Amendment is one of the most important, and most unusual, products of the Scottish Enlightenment. Adam Smith would be delighted. So, probably, would David Hume.

• Iain McLean is Professor of Politics, Oxford University and author of Adam Smith, Radical and Egalitarian (Edinburgh University Press 2006). Like Adam Smith's publisher he was educated at the Royal High School, Edinburgh.