Two historical myths

The religious beliefs of the Founding Fathers - what those beliefs were or if they even had any - have become ammunition in the current battles about the role religion should play in the public square. Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America, by Steven Waldman, tells us what their beliefs were and why most of those of us involved in today's debates get it wrong.

Richard Brookhiser's review explains that there are two myths about the religious convictions of the Founders:

...One common myth, he writes, holds that “the founding fathers wanted religious freedom because they were deists.” The First Amendment, in this view, is a conjurer’s trick designed to hold the rubes’ attention while gentlemen professed polite unbelief over their after-dinner port. In fact, Waldman writes, “few” of the founders “were true deists — people who believed that God had created the universe and then receded from action.” Many were orthodox Christians — Waldman lists Patrick Henry, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, John Witherspoon (a Presbyterian minister) and Roger Sherman. The founders whose biographies fill our best-seller lists are a more heterodox lot. John Adams, a scrappy Unitarian, scolded Catholics, Anglicans and skeptical French philosophers as each passed under his eye. Benjamin Franklin flirted with polytheism in his youth but ended believing in “one God, creator of the universe,” who “governs the world by his providence.” Thomas Jefferson railed against the Christian church, past and present, as corrupting the teachings of Jesus, and made his own digest of Gospel sayings he considered accurate. “It was the work of two or three nights only, at Washington,” Waldman quotes him, “after getting thro’ the evening task of reading the letters and papers of the day.” Yet even these founders, Waldman says, “believed in God and that he shaped their lives and fortunes.”

According to an equal and opposite myth, America’s national origins were Christian. The 13 colonies, Waldman says, were indeed Christian polities, most of them indulging in persecution to uphold their ideals. But the independent United States “was not established as a ‘Christian nation.’” When George Washington was Revolutionary commander in chief, he mandated that his soldiers have chaplains and strongly encouraged them to attend divine service, but his own writings typically employed nondenominational language, appealing to providence rather than Christ. The First Amendment, which, along with its siblings Second through Tenth, was among the first business of Congress under the new Constitution, rejected a national religious establishment. States were allowed to maintain their own establishments, and some did so for decades, although James Madison had hoped to dismantle even these.

Perhaps the strongest supporters of the separation of church and state in the founding era were the communicants of a new, vigorous church, the Baptists. From 1760 to 1778 there were 56 jailings of Baptist preachers in Anglican Virginia. When the Rev. James Ireland continued to preach through the window of his cell, two supporters of the 39 Articles put a bench to the wall, stood on it and urinated in his face. No Barsetshire atmosphere in the New World. At least 14 jailings of Baptists happened in Madison’s home county. “Though much scholarship has gone into assessing which Enlightenment philosophers shaped Madison’s mind,” Waldman says, “what likely influenced him most was not ideas from Europe but persecutions in Virginia.”

Waldman’s conclusion is that “the Founding Faith ... was not Christianity, and it was not secularism. It was religious liberty — a revolutionary formula for promoting faith by leaving it alone.” ....

“Founding Faith” has a few shortcomings. Waldman gives the most ink, as do we all, to the founding all-stars — Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison. Why not spend a little more time, in a book on founding religion, on the most pious and most radical of the founders, Samuel Adams? As a young man, Adams heard Whitefield preach; as an old one, he criticized the anti-Christian polemics of his friend Thomas Paine. Waldman’s favorite among the Big Five is Madison, a wise choice if constitutional interpretation is the core of the story (certainly courts are the venue where church/state issues are hashed out these days). But this is not an unassailable choice. The laws tell us what we may do. Leaders must decide what they themselves should do. If leadership is the focus, then pride of place must go to Washington, who, unlike Madison, ran a successful war and a successful presidency, attributing his success to providence all the while.

Waldman ends by encouraging us to be like the founders. We should understand their principles, learn from their experience, then have at it ourselves. “We must pick up the argument that they began and do as they instructed — use our reason to determine our views.” A good place to start is this entertaining, provocative book. [the review]

Founding Faith - Steven Waldman - Book Review - New York Times