Steve Waldman has been blogging some of the major arguments from his new book, Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America. He says:
As for their religious beliefs, someone in the comment thread said I was being incoherent or contradictory by saying the Big Five (Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, Washington & Madison) were neither Deists nor orthodox Christians. Again, we’re viewing this through a somewhat warped lens. “Deist” and “Orthodox Christian” were not the only two spiritual choices. For one thing, each Founder was slightly different from each other, and changed throughout their lives. But if I had to pick a religion, I’d say they were sort of militant Unitarians. In other words, they had rejected or become uncomfortable with key parts of Christian doctrine and institutional behavior but they did believe in an active God, who intervened in their lives and the lives of the nation.
This is a serious problem. History is messy because people are messy. Do your opinions remain invariant? Are you always unequivocal about your beliefs? Have your personal circumstances and social contexts remained unchanged over your life? Why do people expect that historical dynamics and personages would exhibit any of these characteristics? The opinions of the Founding Fathers regarding religion must be assessed in the context of the full framework of their times as well as the sum totality of their writings. Unfortunately, those with modern axes to grind distort their overall stances by selectively presenting a few opinions of these men which might confuse contemporary audiences.
For example, from my reading it seems clear that the Founding Fathers considered themselves Christians, but would have been rejected as Christians by most modern denominations. They were most certainly cultural Christians, aware of the Anglo-Protestant roots of colonial society. But they were beyond cultural Christians in that most of them seem to have had personal views which were most definitely of a supernatural bent. John Adams was a very conventional Unitarian Christian who seems to have accepted a personal God and all the attendant miracles. Thomas Jefferson for much of his adult life was the closest to being a thoroughgoing religious skeptic with doubts about concepts such as the afterlife, but he also veered toward a more conventional supernaturalism by the end of his life.
Of course, Hindus, Muslims and Jews accept the supernatural and modern Christians don’t accept them as co-religionists. Evangelical Christians even narrow the definition to those who have had a personal conscious conversion in keeping with their Radical Reformation roots. It seems none of the Founding Fathers would have accepted the Nicene Creed, and this rejection would entail their classification as non-Christians despite their own self-perception. In this way they resemble Mormons, who consider themselves Christians but are not considered as such by other denominations.
American society was different in the late 18th century. Though it seems likely that the vast majority of the population would have assented to the tenets of orthodox Christianity during this period, most were also not active members of any church. The reason for this was in large part because most Americans lived on farms and they may simply have been too distant from any Christian church to have any chance for a practical association. Within urbanization and improved transportation more and more Americans had a host of options on Sunday, and so affiliation with institutional religion increased at modest but constant rate until the 1950s, which was the high water of mark of America-the-Churched.
Among the classically educated elite of the late 18th century religious opinions were diverse. Remember that the southern gentry was by and large Anglican, a tradition which routinely accepted a latitudinarianism of belief and practice. It might surprise modern southerners that the great articulator of states rights, John C Calhoun, was a Unitarian (obscure fact, the first two Jewish Senators were from the South, both confederates). In the Middle Atlantic states many prominent Founding Fathers were from heterodox Quaker backgrounds which often required only a minimal confession of specific religious views. Further north in New England the Congregationalist milieu from which John Adams emerged was also fracturing between orthodox traditionalists and unitarians; the latter of whom would go on to form the breakaway Unitarian church which over time rejected a narrow present-tense identification with Christianity despite acknowledging the movement’s historical roots within that tradition (today the Unitarian-Universalists are not members of the National Council of Churches, which is the main voice of mainline Protestantism).
The full richness and subtly of the voices of the past matter, not just the few fragments which may pander to our presuppositions. Historical context matters; the progressive of the past may be the retrograde of today. Too often we draft the past in the service of contemporary issues so as to trivialize the complexities of the ages gone by. We make the past truly relevant by not distorting it toward our ends; rather, best we let it speak for itself and serve us by witnessing to the precedents which point us to why we are where we are.
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