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The past needs to be graded on its own curve

As a follow-up to the below post, I want to outline a bit more precisely how I view judgments of the nature of the Founding and Founders. The difficulty is due to the fact that:

1) The late 18th-century was a profoundly different time

2) Humans in the late 18th-century were also profoundly proto-modern in some ways

They were different. But not totally different.

To me, one way to judge the Founders is in the context of their times, which were different in some substantive ways. Below I alluded to the argument made by some modern American evangelical Protestants that the United States was founded as a Christian nation. What does this mean? Though not always explicit, what they mean is that the United States of America was founded as a Christian nation in an evangelical Protestant sense.

There are several issues with this. First, American evangelical Protestantism is hard to understand without the Second Great Awakening, which postdates the Founding by decades. Second, American evangelical Protestantism has to be seen in the context of the sorts of divisions within American Christianity that came to a head in the Fundamentalist–Modernist controversy. In other words, saying that the United States of America was founded as a Christian nation comes close to being “not even wrong” in the narrow reading. The Founders would not recognize Christianity in American evangelical megachurches, for example.

But, there is a broader reading, and that is that most of the Founders were self-identified Christians, and they assumed and took for granted that their republic was informed by their religion and that religion was Protestant Christianity. Though the Deism of many of the Founders is often emphasized, it is probably closest to the mark to assume that most Deist Founders conceived of their religious opinions as an extension, culmination, and rational perfection, of the Christian tradition.

And yet despite all this, the most interesting aspect of the Founding and religion is how detached the republic was from religion. As noted in Jay Winik’s The Great Upheaval the establishment of a federal government without an established religion was shocking, revolutionary, and controversial, at the time. The Founders may have seen themselves as Christian and assumed that the populace would be Christian indefinitely, but their decision to leave the federal government without attachment to a particular religious institution was what was particularly notable at the time. Similarly, today Elizabeth Cady Stanton would seem on the socially conservative side, but during her lifetime she was a firebrand radical, and her writings shifted the discussion in that direction.

Taken out of context, a sliver of a fact can be used to ‘prove’ anything. That’s the style of argumentation fitting a university English undergraduate. A thesis, and a few supporting facts. True understanding comes from appreciating context.

16 thoughts on “The past needs to be graded on its own curve

  1. This paradox can be explained by the fact that most of the founders were deists.

    the more famous ones at least. it seems the more eminent the more deist…

  2. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2019.12.19.883108v1“Personalized genealogical history inferred from biobank-scale IBD segments”

    Nice little paper on density of cousins in Biobank by UK region (with various differences due to higher recent population growth in the North following Industrial Revolution, and due to different levels of mobility where SE has higher mobility), and otherwise by substructure. Though the authors seem oddly averse to using popgen tools like PCA to cross check some of their results (e.g. identify a suspected Ashkenazi Jewish subcluster on basis of IBD chunk distributions where long chunks outnumber short chunks – OK, but why not check with classic PCA methods and worldwide populations rather than opaque way they check?).

    [this is supposed to be in open-thread, right? -Razib]

  3. recently i’ve done “The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American,” “God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution,” “Did America Have a Christian Founding?” “American Dialogue: The Founders and Us” and “American Gospel.” The last one is the only one I can recommend. Christians can make a decent argument for their case but it comes off as cherry-picked and disingenuous. The evidence “American Gospel” presents is so overwhelming as far as the deliberateness of the intentions of the Founders that it actually makes me angry when I hear people insinuate otherwise.
    right now i’m in the middle of “The Progressive Revolution” and will make time for “The Radicalism of the American Revolution” by Gordon Wood. Surprisingly, the author of “The Progressive Revolution” (who is himself a progressive) includes the Founding as the beginning of his movement and he actually does it somewhat convincingly. I’d say he’s conflating regular liberalism with progressivism but no biggie. He also points out that many times over the last 200 hundred years conservatives have tried to minimize the legacy of Jefferson’s “progressive” ideas and disown Burke’s sympathies for the colonies and The Cause.
    Anyway, yeah, it was pretty different!

  4. This book review makes “Did America Have a Christian Founding?” seem like an excellent read:

    https://www.lawliberty.org/2019/10/30/founding-deists-and-other-unicorns-mark-david-hall-christian-founding/

    From the conclusion:

    “Why does this matter? It’s important to get the history right, of course, but Hall’s concern is more than historical. In today’s fights over religious establishment, liberty, and accommodation, our assumption that America did not have a Christian founding leads us to embrace the wrong conclusions—or perhaps just assumptions—about what the founders would have wanted religion in our public life to look like. When we consider state aid to religious schools, Hall wants us to think about the founding of the University of Georgia; when we discuss the permissibility of the phrase under God in the pledge, we should remember that atheists at the time of the founding could not hold public office; and when we contemplate whether or not bakers and florists should get religious accommodations, we should think about the pacifist Quakers being exempted from military service even as a fledgling nation fought for its existence. Hall’s point is not to force the University of Georgia to hire only Christian professors or to re-institute laws against breaking the Sabbath. But he does want us to practice more balance than we do have when we consider these contested issues. Opponents of prayer in school, for example, may think they are defending the American constitutional order against religious zealots who want to reject the founding principles of the nation. Hall has shown, quite decisively I think, that they are simply mistaken.

    I would like to close by offering a serious question: Has Hall demonstrated that America had a Christian founding, or has he shown only that Christianity should be included as one of the many intellectual streams coming together in the American experiment?

    He has unquestionably shown that Christianity contributes to the founding as one among many, perhaps even the first among equals. But I think he wants to make a stronger claim for Christianity than that, however. Consider the following thought experiment: Imagine an uninhabited area of land next to the United States but neither part of that nation nor any other. An investigative team is sent, and here’s what they learn: Church attendance in this newfound land is absolutely mandatory; Sabbath breaking is punished; office holders must affirm the divine inspiration of the Scriptures; professors at the one publicly funded university must be Christians. Upon learning this news, most Americans would think we had discovered not only a Christian nation but a Christian nation of the most extreme type. Well, if we could travel back in time, Hall perhaps would tell us, that’s precisely what we would find at the time of the American founding. Notice here, though, that we are talking about Christian practice and not about Christian ideas (though we don’t have to separate them, of course).”

  5. Notice here, though, that we are talking about Christian practice and not about Christian ideas (though we don’t have to separate them, of course).”

    xtian ideals were probably stronger than practice. rodney stark has pointed out that in a mostly rural decentralized country early church attendance was low. ‘christianization’ of the republic was a project of the 19th-century.

    the second great awakening marked a huge shift in broad-based piety IMO. before that the south was the locus of religious heterodoxy and freethinking to a great extent (the southern elite in particular).

    from my other blog:
    The reality is that there are plainly mendacious actors out there who launder their credentials to promote lies. This behavior knows no ideology but is quite common and pervasive. Often these “public historians” do not lie or spread falsehood directly, but they obfuscate and redirect attention in such a manner so that their audience draws particular ‘natural’ conclusions which are at variance with reality as we understand it.

    The reality is that there are plainly mendacious actors out there who launder their credentials to promote lies. This behavior knows no ideology but is quite common and pervasive. Often these “public historians” do not lie or spread falsehood directly, but they obfuscate and redirect attention in such a manner so that their audience draws particular ‘natural’ conclusions which are at variance with reality as we understand it.

    i won’t accuse hall of being mendacious. but to me it is clear that in the context of the late 18th-century america was founded as a nation of christians with a christian culture which nevertheless imposed and implemented a level of disestablishmentarianism that was on the radical side. by the 19th-century in some ways it was anachronistic, but historical contingency is a thing (also, american denominational pluralism probably benefited from it).

  6. @ Razib

    “the second great awakening marked a huge shift in broad-based piety IMO. before that the south was the locus of religious heterodoxy and freethinking to a great extent (the southern elite in particular).”

    Interesting, why the elite in particular? I know the big planter class had a nominal Anglican orientation. Is it because they maintained more intellectual and cultural links with elite back in England, so they were more exposed to anticlerical/proto-secular discourse in vogue in 18th century Britain?

    This reminds, I really need to make some time this weekend and read that atheism pre-print you posted last week or so, from reading the abstract it seems like it gels very nicely with your socio-cultural theory of religious “belief” and affiliation.

  7. Is it because they maintained more intellectual and cultural links with elite back in England, so they were more exposed to anticlerical/proto-secular discourse in vogue in 18th century Britain? Is it because they maintained more intellectual and cultural links with elite back in England, so they were more exposed to anticlerical/proto-secular discourse in vogue in 18th century Britain?

    i think they can be thought of as part of a ‘trans-atlantic’ world which includes currents in france too. though most it was on the other side of the atlantic, with only a few intellectuals, like ben franklin, being notable from america.

    to a great extent the planters remained cool to evangelical piety even after the masses were converted to methodism and baptism. john c calhoun was a convert to unitarianism. but the antireligious sentiments more common around 1800 disappeared as the south became traditionalist in religion. (the french revolution was more popular in the south!)

  8. the point is that the federal gov. didn’t operate under the umbrella of an established church. that was bizarre. and the precedent clearly had a cultural impact since the established churches disappeared in the early 19th-century. everyone knows about the state churches. they were typical and expected. distestablishmentarianism was not

  9. “everyone knows about the state churches”

    I am not so sure if this remains as true as it once was. Perhaps I am wrong, but my memory is this used to be a much easier fact to find.

    I googled:

    https://www.google.com/search?q=List+of+US+states+with+established+religions&rlz=1C1GCEB_enUS845US845&oq=List+of+US+states+with+established+religions&aqs=chrome..69i57.18422j0j8&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

    I think 10 years ago this would have returned links with a much clearer list of the states that did and didn’t. The info is still there if one digs, but it sure seems to me that effort has been expended to push it down the memory hole. Maybe I am a crazy old man, and i certainly am too lazy to spend a bunch of wayback machine time trying to prove such a point.

  10. well, ‘everyone’ = ppl who read history books. a small number.

    to be frank, the ‘actually there were established churches’ is a dumb right-wing counterpoint to the radicalism of no federal state church. the former is the default/null for almost all societies. even if it wasn’t an exclusive church (e.g., china), the connection between established cults and the state through preferential subsidy and temporal interaction is normal.

  11. China had an established church while they were repressing the monasteries? The idea hadn’t occurred to me, although now that I think about it Henry VIII was seizing assets from monasteries while establishing his own Church.

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