Adams agreed strongly with British Parliamentarian and friend of the American Revolution, Edmund Burke, that the French Revolution "completely pulled down to the ground their monarchy, their church, their nobility, their law . . . and destroyed all balances . . . which serve to fix the state and give it steady direction, and then they melted down the whole into one incongruous mass of mob and democracy." Adams adds, "Everything will be pulled down. But will be built up? Are there any principles of political architecture? . . . Will the struggle in Europe be anything other than a change in imposters?" (Id.)

The French Enlightenment established human reason as absolute over revelation, the triumph of Athens over Jerusalem, embodying the Enlightenment idea of man as the center of all things. The American Revolution was a child of the British/American enlightenments. As such, it was at its heart, built upon the Declaration of Rights embodied in the British Glorious Revolution of 1688-89. These rights were obtained from God and inherent in mankind. The American Revolution, thus, "owed nothing to the French and much to the English." ("The Roads to Modernity")

While the American Revolution was not exclusively based on religious principles, such religious virtues, both social and individual, were crucial to the American ideal of liberty. Adams, again, "We shall succeed if we are virtuous. Liberty without virtue would be no blessing to us." (Roads to Modernity) The French Revolution, on the other hand, was explicitly anti-religious. Its notion of liberty quickly degenerated to self absorbed libertine-ness. "Here, as elsewhere, reason was not just pitted against religion, defined in opposition to religion; it was implicitly granted the same absolute, dogmatic status as religion."

Two centuries on, we are still wrestling with the consequences of the war between systems of thinking rooted in either God ordained inherent rights, responsibility, and liberty versus nihilistic, untethered, self absorbed individualism.

Joseph A. Cannon is editor of the Deseret News.