From biographies to sweeping narratives, from readable pop history to dry-as-dust academic publications, books exploring the lives of the Founding Fathers increasingly are being published.
One misunderstood aspect of the Founding Era is the role that religion played. Conversing recently with a rigid secularist who has utmost faith in human reason, (a throwback to the French Enlightenment), I heard that “Not one Founding Father was a Christian!” A few months earlier I talked with a churchgoing fundamentalist (a throwback outside of Middle America) who supposed the Founding Fathers believed similarly to his KJV-only pastor.
But the reality is more complicated. David L. Holmes, in The Faiths of the Founding Fathers, argues that America’s first patriots were non-Christian deists, Christian deists, or orthodox Christians. Although many Deists considered essential tenets of Christianity, such as the trinity, the incarnation, and the resurrection as myths, irreconcilable with human reason, most maintained denominational affiliations; and in spite of their anti-clericalism, some even regularly attended church services. As historian Mark Noll concludes, most were “Deist-like — but not exactly.”
At the Continental Congress were also many orthodox Christians such as John Jay, whom John Adams considered a “church-going animal” and believer in divine revelation and dispensation. What united the three groups, Holmes writes, was their belief in a guiding Providence and eternal life, the importance of virtue and Jesus’ ethical teachings, and love of religious freedom and hatred of tyranny.
Holmes provides a good start in understanding a complex history, but an in-depth discussion of how American thinkers differed from their Radical Enlightenment counterparts is needed.
Unlike Voltaire and Rousseau, the skeptical Enlightenment, including Montesquieu and the Founding Fathers, respected traditions and the religious core of Western Civilization. Without acknowledging how the Old West shaped American thought, writes Russell Kirk, one cannot understand the cardinal ideas of American civilization: justice, order, and freedom.
It is indeed impossible to understand them without knowing that American republicanism placed classical and Renaissance ideas within the context of Augustinian Christianity and wrapped Lockean ideas of liberty around the Christian idea of covenants. Does this mean the Founders were Christians? Not necessarily. It means that their times influenced them, that they respected Christianity, and that the language of Christendom gives meaning and understanding to American political and social values.
The debate usually omits two other essential aspects. One, the Founding Fathers comprised an intellectual elite who represented a religious and many times zealous majority that checked any notions to establish an entirely secular government. The traveling French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville noticed the importance of religion to average Americans and recorded that “on the seventh day of every week the trading and working life of the nation seems suspended.”
Two, modern Americans with statist assumptions forget that America was created as a federalism of states, united only for the purposes expressed in the Constitution. Most private matters remained to the states to decide, and within them, people controlled most of their private lives.
The Constitution does not mention God or religion and bans religious tests in Article VI because federalists considered religion a matter best decided by individuals and their states. Many state constitutions preceded the federal one, and those and new ones sometimes retained a mild form of religious establishment and many times explicit religious qualifications for public office.
When public opinion changed within a state, new state constitutions or amendments were drafted, as evidenced by the 1835 modification to the religious qualifications for office holders in North Carolina from “Protestant” to “Christian” and the exclusion of only “atheists” from public office in the 1868 constitution. Not until 1961 did the U.S. Supreme Court decide that such restrictions in the states were unconstitutional.
Long story short: Serious and in-depth inquiry concerning the extent of religious influence during the Founding Era is necessary to understand the times as they were.
Dr. Troy Kickler is director of the North Carolina History Project.