God’s Own Country
It never ceases to amaze me how furiously American conservatives react when anyone points out that the Founding Fathers were rationalists and Deists who, like all such, had a particularly ferocious hatred of Catholicism, and whose position is summed up in The Jefferson Bible, from which all reference to Christ’s Divinity, Resurrection and miracles has been expunged. What did people think that they were? Puritans, perhaps. They were not.
They would have been horrified by an America in which the single largest bloc was Catholic. They would have viewed Evangelical Protestantism as quite beneath derision. They would have recognized Mormonism as a perversion of their own and Joseph Smith’s Freemasonry (all that “angel in the whirlwind” business). But most of all, they would have been baffled by the level of church attendance in today’s America. The America that they knew and envisaged, by no means only in their own class, was simply not like that at all. Who ever said it was?
Of course, how could it have been? The great culture-defining immigrations and religious revivals still lay ahead. The real Founding Fathers of any country now recognizable as America are rather less sung figures, and one would have thought rather more endearing ones to the TAC crowd: the Irish, Italian, Polish and other pioneers of Catholic America; and the Scots-Irish, German, Scandinavian and other pioneers of Protestant America in, above all, the South and the West. Why venerate East Coast liberal élite figures instead?
Even now, unbelievers outnumber everyone except Catholics and Baptists. Far from Hispanics’ being the great hope of American Catholicism, Latin America has never been a very Catholic place, with slight if any Mass-going majorities, huge numbers of the unbaptised, rampant syncretism and surviving paganism, and a very heavy dependence on (historically European, these days usually North American) missionary priests. Wishing for the United States to remain an English-speaking country is fully compatible with Catholicism. Indeed, those who are most vocal in that cause are themselves traditional Catholics, as TAC readers will be fully aware.
And the myth of “Christian America” and “secular Europe” has always been precisely that: a myth. It is not in America, but in Britain, that there are bishops sitting as such in the legislature, publicly funded Christian chaplains in the Armed Forces and the public healthcare service, and (at least on paper) Christian religious instruction and collective worship in the taxpayer-maintained schools. It is not in America, but in Germany, that there are church taxes, with numerous public services provided by the churches as the largest employers after the several tiers of government, and with the Kirchentag. It was not in America nationally (although I grant and rejoice that it was in California and in Florida), but in Portugal, that there was a recent reaffirmation that marriage is only ever the union of one man and one woman. Connecticut, in fact, voted for same-sex “marriage” at almost exactly the same time as Portugal voted against it.
It is not in America that there is any Christian sacral monarchy, monarchy being an institution for which no purely secular argument can be created, and there being 11 Christian sacral monarchies in Europe (12 if you count the Vatican), one of which also exercises several interrelated global roles such as make it the contemporary world’s pre-eminent or even only example of the tradition of the Holy Roman Emperors, the Byzantine Emperors, and the Tsars of All The Russia. And so on.
The Founding Fathers consciously wanted rid of those such things which existed in their day, and thus of the underlying mood and spirit that has since given rise to the rest of them: the Biblical view of religion as public truth, explictly shaping public policy. That America is or has been like this anyway is and has been in spite of the Founding Fathers, not because of them, and overwhelmingly a result of later immigration from Europe, which at least in the first generation of settlement was not shaped by their thought. I am not advocating the adoption in America of the sorts of arrangements set out above. But I am certainly advocating – indeed, pleading for – that mood, that spirit. (Just as far more Americans define themselves as atheists or agnostics than Europeans tend to assume, so far fewer Europeans so define themselves than Americans tend to assume. And when it comes to levels of church attendance, try suggesting to even apparently the least observant of European villages that its church should be closed.)
If you want (as you should, and which TAC reader would not?) an economy, society, culture and polity defined by the Biblical-Classical synthesis in Christ and His Church, rather than by the alternative Masonic re-working of both traditions along Deist lines, then, while you certainly do not need to discard everything that the Founding Fathers ever said, you no less certainly do need to get over them; to adopt a vastly more critical attitude toward them, beginning with an end to the treatment of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as if they were part of the Bible, and the utterances of the Founding Fathers as if they were those of the Prophets or the Apostles. Rather, like all human systems, they sit under God as He has disclosed Himself. They are means, no ends, and must therefore be judged according to how well or how badly they serve enormously greater goods.
This is an integral part of America’s global role; of Manifest Destiny, if you must. It is the secularism rather than the Christianity that American soft power is exporting, ultimately because it is the secularism rather than the Christianity that is held to be fundamental to the Republic. The secularization of Europe in the twentieth century is very largely attributable to this. In most cases it is certainly not because of the formal institutions, although many of those institutions, which simply assumed the Christian character of the wider culture and polity, have been partly or wholly destroyed as part of that process. There is something similar about the movements in, again, Connecticut, to compel Orthodox synagogues to conduct same-sex “marriages”, and to subject Catholic parishes and dioceses to the rule of lay councils. The first is held to be what the Founding Fathers would have wanted, the second to be the sort of government that they ordained. So that’s that, then. Isn’t it?
The good news, so to speak, for America is that, as the European experience shows, regular or occasional churchgoers are far more likley to vote, and far, far, far more likely to end up in national legislatures. But they have to be properly formed and informed in the exercise of their political responsibilitiies. Lazily assuming that the Founding Fathers were a God-fearing lot, or that the Constitution somehow establishes a Christian nation, or whatever, is not a sign of such formation, or of such information, or of such responsibility.
The Constitution doesn’t establish a nation, period. It establishes a confederation of republics, each of which is free to have an established church if it so desires.
You wrote, “It never ceases to amaze me how furiously American conservatives react when anyone points out that the Founding Fathers were rationalists and Deists who, like all such, had a particularly ferocious hatred of Catholicism, and whose position is summed up in The Jefferson Bible…,”
Perhaps you are willing to accept the words of the founders themselves regarding the place of religion in the early republic and their own lives.
Jefferson was “walking with his large red prayer book under his arm when a friend querying him after their mutual good morning said, which way are you walking, Mr Jefferson. To which he replied to Church Sir. You going to church Mr. J.? You do not believe a word of it. Sir said Mr. J. No nation has ever yet existed or been governed without religion. The chrisitan religion is the best religion that has been given to man and as I am the chief magistrate of this nation am bound to give it the sanction of my example.”
Anecdote recorded by the Rev. Ethan Allen, “Washington Parish, Washington City.” Manuscript Division, Library of Congress
Or this from Benjamin Rush, reputed deist:
“I fear all our attempts to produce political happiness by the solitary influence of human reason will be as fruitless as the search for the philosopher’s stone. It seems to be reserved to Christianity alone to produce universal, moral, political, and physical happiness.”
Benjamin Rush to Noah Webster, July 20, 1798. Butterfield, Letters Of Rush, 2:299
Perhaps you would accept Washington’s words:
“You do well to wish to learn our crafts and ways of life, and above all the religion of Jesus Christ. These will make you a greater and happier people than you are.”
George Washington to the Delaware chiefs, May 12, 1779. Fitzpatrick, Writings of Washington, 15:55
How about Hamilton?
“Can we in prudence suppose that national morality can be maintained in exclusion of religious principles? Does it not require the aide of a generally received and divinely authoritative Religion?”
Alexander Hamilton, draft of Washington’s Farewell Address, (1796) Hamilton Papers, Library of Congress
Or Jefferson ‘The Deist’ again.
“…….who now can question that the whole Bible and Testiment are part of the Common Law? and that Connecticut, in blue laws, laying it down as a principle that the laws of god should be the laws of the land.”
Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, January 14, 1814. Cappon, Adams-Jefferson Letters, 2:423
And finally John Adams:
“Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
John Adams to the Officers of the First Brigade of the 3rd Division of the Massacheussets Militia, October 11, 1798, Adams Papers (microfilm), reel 119, Library of Congress
There are hundreds of such examples of religiosity by the Founders. Your blithe disregard for the facts of American History render your writing on politics here an affront to the reader. For instance:
You seem to think that the Scots-Irish came as a wave of immigration after the revolution. In fact they were already here, and largely supported the revolution.
You cite the anti-catholicism of many of the founders while omitting that one of the founders (John Carol) was himself a Catholic. Many of Washington’s troops were Catholic, as were a large contingent from Quebec.
Do you really think our armed forces lack Christian chaplains?
What could be the meaning of this? “They would have viewed Evangelical Protestantism as quite beneath derision.” While most of the founders were establishment churchgoers, they would have been very aware that the Baptists provided a critical pro-revolutionary force in America. Elias Boudinot was a born-again Presbyterian and was not despised by his fellow revolutionaries.
There are just too many howlers in your piece to address. Please, write about something you know.
More Jefferson quotes, mostly from the collection of his personal letters:
Standard liberal whining about religion:
“Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. ”
Abstract hostility against clergymen:
“They [the clergy] believe that any portion of power confided to me, will be exerted in opposition to their schemes. And they believe rightly; for I have sworn upon the altar of god, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. But this is all they have to fear from me: and enough, too, in their opinion. ”
Secular view of the history of English law:
“Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law. ”
Doubts the legitimacy of the Christian Gospels, finds some material repulsive:
“The whole history of these books [the Gospels] is so defective and doubtful that it seems vain to attempt minute enquiry into it: and such tricks have been played with their text, and with the texts of other books relating to them, that we have a right, from that cause, to entertain much doubt what parts of them are genuine. In the New Testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts, as to pick out diamonds from dunghills. ”
Anticlericalism, associates clergy with tyranny:
“History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes. ”
Assumedly he is referring to the Eucharist:
“Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity. It is the mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus.”
Jefferson against all churches:
“You say you are a Calvinist. I am not. I am of a sect by myself, as far as I know. ”
What about the Gospels does he find repulsive?:
“Among the sayings and discourses imputed to him [Jesus] by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence; and others again of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same being.”
Apparently you can argue against the Church’s antimaterialism by citing Saint John (Locke):
“To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, god, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or that there is no god, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise: but I believe I am supported in my creed of materialism by Locke, Tracy, and Stewart. At what age of the Christian church this heresy of immaterialism, this masked atheism, crept in, I do not know. But heresy it certainly is. ”
Washington is not typically cited as a Deist, although it is clear he was not very religious. Hamilton accused Jefferson of atheism, so he kept up a public image of Christianity. However, there is no argument here about Jefferson. Jefferson was not anti-Jesus, he accepted much of Christian morality (perhaps as much as a self-confessed materialist can), but very little at all of Christian theology. He saw traditional Christian practice as silly and superstitious. He viewed the Church and clergymen as a huge threat to liberal republican government and sought at every turn to curb their power.
It also seems he referred to himself as a Christian once or twice while President (perhaps for political reasons) and as a Unitarian (=non-Christian) by the end of his life.
Traditional Christianity and classical liberalism do not mix. Much of American political history is about the watering down of this liberalism by Christianity, and much of our cultural history has been the liberalisation of the Church to bring it into compatibility with the stated political goals and national creed of the country. That’s simply the truth.
Thomas is saying everything I need to, but just a quick response to pb. I am not necessarily advocating established churches in the US, but the English one has been historically useful in that the sheer objectionability of the determination of doctrine by Parliament has kept people out of it, whether aboard the Barque of Saint Peter or elsewhere.
That in turn gave rise to the demands for political reform, especially since (there’ll be a post on this at some point, since there are American dimensions) Catholics, Quakers, and also many Baptists and Congregationalists regarded the state created in 1688 as illegitimate.
Thomas, a series of Jefferson quotations doesn’t refute or even address the fact that the founders as a group were church-going Christians. I strung together a series of religious statements by several founders as a way of showing a general religious mentality. While he was a free thinker, Jefferson never renounced Christianity and his writings clearly show that he grew more, rather than less Christian as he grew old. In fact he was a vestryman at the Albemarle County Courthouse. While President he was an assiduous attendee at services held every Sunday at the House of Representatives. Please note that the agnostic, deist founders seemed to have no difficulty in actually worshiping in public buildings.
Washington is accused of deism in some quarters despite the fact that he was also a scrupulous church-goer, and served as a vestryman in his local parish. His writings and proclamations are suffused with religious references and exhortations. So how was he “not very religious”?
James Madison also regularly attended services in the House. John Adams attended services (twice!) every Sunday, in retirement. Hamilton insisted on receiving communion on his deathbed. Roger Sherman published a sermon for the theological guidance of his congregation. John Dickinson wrote a catechism for Christian youth, and I could go on and on.
I’m surprised that you didn’t cite Franklin. He did have a truly skeptical streak. But even he always supported established religion outwardly. Of course, Tom Paine was close to, if not a true atheist. If you read his life, he was roundly hated for it on his return to American from France. It seems to me that the whole case for the irreligious Founders rests on the examples of Jefferson, Franklin and Paine. This leaves out the whole rest of the generation of leaders who actually fought the revolution and established the government. Just because David never heard of them doesn’t make them irrelevant.
David, since you hide behind Thomas’s Jefferson quotes as a response, I assume you have no repost to my points above. But can you really believe this: “But most of all, they would have been baffled by the level of church attendance in today’s America. The America that they knew and envisaged, by no means only in their own class, was simply not like that at all. Who ever said it was”? Have you perchance ever stumbled on the term, “The Great Awakening.” It was a great wave of religious fervor and re-commitment that swept the colonies in the 1740′s forward. That’s thirty years before the revolution. The generation of the founders grew up in it. Schoolboys used to be taught all about it here, but foreign dilettantes may overlook it.
We may debate interpretation, but we may not make up our own facts and lecture strangers on their own History.
“It seems to me that the whole case for the irreligious Founders rests on the examples of Jefferson, Franklin and Paine”
Well, they are rather significant figures. Going all the way back to Lord Herbert of Cherbury (whose brother was a hugely influential High Church pastoral theologian and hymn-writer, but there we are) and even beyond, Deists have always believed in worshipping the First Cause, the Great Architect of the Universe. They have even believed in post-mortal reward and punishment, so that “I tremble when I consider that God is just”. But they have not, by definition, believed God to be in any way active in His world, whether in the past or in the present. Nothing could be further from Christianity. And nothing could better encapsulate the position of the Founding Fathers.
The churchgoing will have been in that vein, as a social thing (by no means unusual about people who are officially or unofficially Deists), and quite possibly as a class indicator, to distinguish themselves from the common people, who, as any serious study will tell (and as you know anyway) were very unobservant indeed in the America of the time.
Something else may have been taught in schools, but that can be, quite legitimately, as much about the lore of the tribe as about the facts of the matter. You know perfectly well that, far from being overtaxed (in any case a completely separate point from taxation without representation), the Colonists were the least taxed people in any comparable country at the time. But that is not what is taught in schools.
The arms of the Town of Washington in these parts, George Washington’s ancestral home, have stars and stripes on them and have had for a very long time, but I doubt that that is mentioned in American schools. (I doubt that his brother who was a British Army officer throughout the War of Independence is much mentioned, either.) Baseball was invented in England, and time was when it was very popular here. And so on. But, as I say, the lore of the tribe. Part of what schools are for.
The First Great Awakening may well have influenced the emergence of radically democratic sentiment in America (rather more than it influenced regular churchgoing, in fact), as the Second massively influenced abolitionism, and as the Third had an impact on the New Deal and other measures at that time. But the more important Founding Fathers certainly did not come from that background, and such thought was roundly defeated by the incorporation into the Constitution of those features which conservatives most extol, such as the Electoral College and the Senate. Quite right, too.
Doesn’t M.E. Bradford’s _Religion and the Framers: Biographical Evidence_ (1991) support the conservative contention about the Protestant Christianity of the Founders?
Jefferson was irreligious only in private. He kept his butchery of Holy Writ to himself and a few friends, or his reputation would never have endured.
If Wikipedia can be trusted on this point, his “Bible” wasn’t published until 1895.
David, your response to what to assert the importance of Jefferson, Franklin and Paine. You then launch into a disquisition on the nature of Deism and another unsupported pronouncement to the effect that the founders as deists, only pretended to be Christians. Of the three founders you find significant, only one was even at the Constitutional Convention. Jefferson was in France and Paine was off scribbling somewhere.
The people you hold to be deists wrote sermons, corresponded with clergy on matters of theology, attended services held in public buildings and invoked Jesus Christ by name innumerable times. They prayed publicly and were known to have prayed in private. An you would have us believe they were faking it, for a public you claim was unchurched!
And there is this. “The churchgoing will have been in that vein, as a social thing (by no means unusual about people who are officially or unofficially Deists), and quite possibly as a class indicator, to distinguish themselves from the common people, who, as any serious study will tell (and as you know anyway) were very unobservant indeed in the America of the time.” This is a breathtaking assertion of error in the service of frivolity. Church attendence at the time of the revolution may have been as high as seventy percent according to recent studies. How can you claim that attendence was low at a time when many lay preachers of the awakening traveled and preached in barns, Inns, and homes. The next time you travel to America, just wander out into the hinterlands of New Jersey, Connecticut or elsewhere in the old colonial states and examine the corner stones of the multitude of old churches still standing. Or are you simply not interested in evidence?
Casual readers of this exchange may wish to read an unpublished review of James H. Hutson’s The Founders on Religion on my blog. http://odysseusontherocks.blogspot.com/