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  • From: Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>
  • To: "homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org" <homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [Homestead] Founding fathers and religion
  • Date: Sat, 06 May 2006 12:16:42 -0500

From time to time we are subjected to the assertion that our country was founded on Christian principles by Christian men. The motto "In God We Trust" comes to mind as oft-offered proof. As affecting various parts of the Constitution, time is not necessarily illuminating. In addition to exploring the subject above, the three books reviewed here illustrate that time does not always see progress in human development.


Books by David L. Holmes, Peter R. Henriques and Jon Meacham


Keeping the Faith at Arm's Length

Review by ALAN WOLFE
Published: May 7, 2006

Like most of his colleagues on the religious right, Tim LaHaye, a co-author of the best-selling "Left Behind" series, insists that "those who founded this nation" were "citizens who had a personal and abiding faith in the God of the Bible." If LaHaye means only to say that religion has played an important role in American history, he is surely correct. But if he is taken literally (as a believer in the inerrancy of the Bible should be), he is decidedly wrong. It is one of the oddities of our history that this very religious country was created by men who, for one brief but significant moment, had serious reservations about religion in general and Christianity in particular.

According to David L. Holmes's "Faiths of the Founding Fathers," none of the first five presidents were conventional Christians. All were influenced to one degree or another by Deism, the once-popular view that God set the world in motion and then abstained from human affairs. <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/a/john_adams/index.html?inline=nyt-per>John Adams, a Unitarian, did not accept such Christian basics as "the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, total depravity and predestination." <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/j/thomas_jefferson/index.html?inline=nyt-per>Thomas Jefferson cut and pasted his own Bible. Before he became president, James Madison wrote the "Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments," a classic text in the history of religious liberty. Our fifth president, James Monroe, gave his name to a doctrine, but it had nothing to do with faith; in fact, Monroe may have been the least religious of all our early presidents.

And then there was the first one. "Were George Washington living today," LaHaye has said, "he would freely identify with the Bible-believing branch of evangelical Christianity that is having such a positive influence on our nation." Yet as Peter R. Henriques documents in "Realistic Visionary," Washington never referred to Jesus in any of his letters. Not once during his death ordeal did he call for a minister, ask for forgiveness or express belief in an afterlife. Washington "is better understood as a man of honor than as a man of religion," Henriques concludes.

This is not to suggest that religion was absent from the founding. Seven of the 10 wives and female children of our first five presidents were devout Christians. (Holmes offers two possible explanations: unlike the men, the women never attended college, where Deism was commonly propagated, and they were not welcome in the Masonic lodges so popular among 18th-century Deists.) Sam Adams may have been a political revolutionary, but he was also a religious conservative convinced that his countrymen were on the road to perdition. John Jay, the first chief justice of the Supreme Court, was considered almost too religious by the devout John Adams. And then there is perhaps the most religious of all our early leaders, Elias Boudinot, a descendant of French Huguenots. President of the Continental Congress, Boudinot wrote "The Age of Revelation" to counter Tom Paine's "Age of Reason." It says volumes about our country that Paine is as remembered as Boudinot is forgotten.

Because today's religious right is determined to read the present back into the past, historians who write about faith and the founding find themselves on disputed ground. Nonetheless, both Henriques and Holmes are trustworthy guides. Henriques deals with Washington's life as a whole and spends only one chapter on religion. But he is fair-minded and thoughtful, and because he possesses no other agenda than a desire to uncover the real man, he is convincing when he concludes that "if one defines 'Christian' as the evangelicals do . . . George Washington cannot be properly referred to as a Christian."

Holmes, to his credit, never falls into the trap of judging 18th-century figures by 21st-century standards. He also offers exceptionally insightful guidelines for judging the faith of the founding fathers. Do not ask whether they were baptized, he suggests, since nearly all Christians at the time were baptized at birth; ask instead whether they baptized their children. Read this elegant book and you will know all about early America's major varieties of Calvinism; the rise of Southern, or Separatist, Baptism; the differences between Deism and Unitarianism; and the language that differentiates a conventional Christian ("Savior," "Redeemer," "the Resurrected Christ") from a Deist Christian ("Merciful Providence," "Divine Goodness").

Unlike Holmes, Jon Meacham, in "American Gospel," does judge American history through the perspective of the present. "Their time is like our time," he writes, and because it is, the middle ground they discovered can help us overcome the rift we currently face between religious fundamentalists and dogmatic secularists. It all sounds wise and reassuring. Alas, it is not persuasive.

For one thing, America is not now divided between fundamentalists and secularists, at least not in anything approaching equal measure. No atheist could ever be elected president, while extremists associated with the religious right, like James Dobson, are routinely consulted by the White House. Meacham, by implication, concedes as much; when he discusses the religious right he mentions specific figures like <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/f/jerry_falwell/index.html?inline=nyt-per>Jerry Falwell and <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/pat_robertson/index.html?inline=nyt-per>Pat Robertson, but when he turns to the secularists, the only name he comes up with is that of the militant atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair, who died 11 years ago.

Even if we desperately need a vital center between belief and unbelief, most of the founders were not centrists. To be sure, they proclaimed that religion was the source of morality and peppered their speeches and state papers with religious language. But it does the historical record no service to see them as compromising on the conflict between reason and revelation the same way they compromised on the power of big states and small ones. Men of the Enlightenment, they feared what Washington called "the horrors of spiritual tyranny." Their conception of religious liberty made room for non-Christians and even nonbelievers, and their language deliberately avoided sectarian terminology. They were intellectual radicals, willing to push the idea of religious tolerance further than it had ever been pushed before.

Although the founding fathers appear in Meacham's subtitle, only one chapter of his book deals with them. The rest is a rushed tour through American religious history in which Darwin shares a chapter with the Civil War and Jim Crow coexists with the Great Depression. There are some surprises along the way; Meacham points out that Andrew Jackson, a demagogue when he chose to be, resisted the revivalism of his time in favor of separating faith from politics, and he presents a portrait of <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/franklin_delano_roosevelt/index.html?inline=nyt-per>Franklin Roosevelt as something of a public theologian. Still, Meacham's book falls between the cracks. It is, by his own admission, not academic history. But, since our era bears so little resemblance to the era of the founders, neither is it the narrative essay he claims to be presenting.

Religion is so important to our country, and the founding fathers were so unusual in their blending of statecraft and political philosophy, that no one treatment of faith and the founding will ever be definitive. Still, these three books present irrefutable evidence that our greatest leaders and thinkers knew where the work of God stopped and the need for human creativity began. We often want to believe that history moves forward. When we compare the role of religion in politics at our founding to its role today, we just might conclude otherwise.

Alan Wolfe directs the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/07/books/review/07wolfe.html




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