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.
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.