PIETAS

Only readers of old literature are aware of the richer and nobler senses of the words in the premodern West, as in the Confucian East, where the virtue of piety (|M or li is the Chinese correlative) was regarded as the lynchpin of the social and political virtues. If we have normal moral responses, we feel grateful for all the things we have been given that we have done nothing to deserve: the love and nurture of parents and family; the kindness of friends and benefactors; the benefits of a well-ordered society; the freedoms we enjoy thanks to the sacrifices of our countrymen; the beauty and bounty of nature, which God pours down upon us every day. Pietas is cultivated, or used to be cultivated, in civil religion: public prayers, oaths, the Pledge of Allegiance, sacred symbols on our coinage and inscriptions, buildings such as the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. To speak of our "Founding Fathers" exemplifies the virtue of piety in civic life, fusing the due reverence we give our natural parents with the proper gratitude we have for those who labored on battlefields and in legislative chambers to give birth to our nation. Imperial China, lacking the tradition of civil law that knits Western societies together, relied all the more on the virtue and humanity of magistrates, reinforced by strict observance of pious rites, in order to maintain order and due hierarchy in the Middle Kingdom. Since the late seventeenth century, the idea has grown in the West that the state should tolerate impiety, especially toward God, in the interest of freedom of thought.