One of the more
annoying assertions of the fundamentalist right is that America is a country
founded on “Judeo-Christian values” and that it ought to return to such values.
Translation: we need more religion in our government, we need to refer to the
Bible when it comes to issues like abortion and gay rights, and we need,
generally, to remove the wall separating church and state.
I could make several arguments just
from a practical, political point of view. 1. The Founding Fathers were looking
to avoid the theocratic traps of the European countries they fled, like
state-sponsored religious oppression and divinely ordained monarchy. 2.
Religious institutions are never more pernicious and violent than when they
hold the reins of both church and state - see Medieval Christianity and Modern
Islam for examples. 3. Faced with a country packed with different sects and
religious experiments, the last thing
the Fathers wanted was to try and regulate them or anoint one of them as a
national denomination. 4. The wall between church and state was designed not
just to eliminate religious influence over the government, but to prevent
government interference in churches. Be careful what you ask for.
That said, let’s go back to that
original argument: “America was founded on Judeo-Christian values.” In The Faiths of the Founding Fathers
(2006, Oxford University Press), religious studies professor David L. Holmes
takes a look at the six principal players – Franklin, Washington, Adams,
Jefferson, Madison and Monroe – and comes away with an alarmingly consistent
pattern. To a one, these men performed their public religious duties at
orthodox churches. To a one, their hearts belonged to Deism.
The Enlightenment flame of Deism took
hold at colonial colleges during the middle of the 18th century,
just when the future Fathers were matriculating. Of particular import was
Virginia’s William and Mary, where Monroe and Jefferson studied and Washington
served as chancellor. The college was described by an orthodox Episcopalian as
“…the hotbed of infidelity and of the wild politics of France.”
“Deism influenced, in one way or
another, most of the political leaders who designed the new American
government,” wrote Holmes. “If census takers trained in Christian theology had
set up broad categories in 1790 labeled ‘Atheism,’ ‘Deism and Unitarianism,’
‘Orthodox Protestantism,’ ‘Orthodox Roman Catholicism’ and ‘Other,’ and if they
had interviewed Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe,
they would undoubtedly have placed every one of these six founding fathers in
some way under the category of ‘Deism and Unitarianism.’”
So What is Deism?
Actually defining Deism is like landing a Space
Shuttle on an aircraft carrier. The Deist worldview begins with an all-powerful
God, but one who remains a little distant. He is portrayed as setting the
universe into motion and then leaving the rest to us, like a pool player who
sends the balls scattering over the table and then leaves the room. The New
Testament plays a part – largely in the teachings of Jesus – but is subject to
the judgements of Reason, against which it does not fare well.
In his provocative tome The Age of Reason, Thomas Paine
professed a great love for this Deist god but often sounded exactly like an
atheist. He labeled Christianity “a fable, which, for absurdity and
extravagance, is not exceeded by any thing that is to be found in the mythology
of the ancients.”
“Yet if a reader cannot call Deism ‘atheistic,’”
added Holmes, “it is equally impossible to call the movement ‘Christian.’ Deists
repeatedly called into question any teaching or belief of Christianity that
they could not reconcile with human reason. For them reason was paramount in
determining religious truth.”
The harshest critic was Thomas
Jefferson. An outward Anglican and Episcopalian, Jefferson attempted to keep
his more radical thoughts to his closest friends. Nonetheless, in the 1800
election he was smeared by Adams ally Alexander Hamilton as an atheist.
Congregationalist clergy warned their followers that, if Jefferson were
elected, they would have to hide their Bibles.
In character, Jefferson was a
restorationist; he wanted to return Christianity to its original intentions.
“Christian Mythologists, calling themselves the Christian Church,” wrote Paine,
had “set up a system of religion very contradictory to the character of the
person whose name it bears.” Jefferson agreed, and seemed to have special
places in hell for the gospels’ Hellenic influences, the apostle Paul (the
first “corrupter of the doctrines of Jesus”) and Protestant reformer John Calvin,
whose followers “introduced into Christian religion more obscenities than its
leader had purged it of old ones.”
Propelled by these passions, Jefferson
literally took up scissors and razor and removed anything from his copy of the
New Testament that he believed to be unreasonable or corrupt: Paul’s letters, Revelations, all miracle stories and
prophecies; virgin births, resurrections, any argument for Jesus’ divinity, and
the Last Supper. The resulting work, comprising mostly the teachings and life of
Jesus, was not published until a century after Jefferson’s death, under the
title The Life and Morals of Jesus.
This highly individualized view of
religion was common among Deists, and the six Founders profiled in Holmes’ book
all had different takes on Christianity. Washington, for instance, had a strong
aversion to the Last Supper and its magical cannibalism, and refused to take
communion. (This snowflake diversity is similar to modern atheists, each of
whom seems to carry their own packet of idiosyncratic definitions. As well they
should.)
I suppose what I wish to demonstrate
with this chapter is that our dear Fathers, so often reduced to cold marble
statuary, were radical thinkers, and, by the standards of many of the day’s
churches, heretics. (To repeat, Thomas
Jefferson did not believe in the divinity of Jesus.) Fueled by coffee and
The Enlightenment, they were letting their great minds run roughshod over every
old idea of government and theology. And if there was one principle on which
they agreed, it was the preservation of religious freedom. The firmest
guarantor of that freedom was a solid wall between church and state.
Historian Gordon C. Wood, in his book,
The Radicalism of the American Revolution
(1991, Vintage Books), gave a particularly blunt summary of the Founders’
attitudes.
“Most
of the founding fathers had not put much emotional stock in religion… Most of
the revolutionary gentry only passively believed in organized Christianity and,
at worst, privately scorned and ridiculed it. Jefferson hated orthodox
clergymen… Even puritanical John Adams thought that the argument for Christ’s
divinity was an ‘awful blasphemy’… When Hamilton was asked why the members of
the Philadelphia convention had not recognized God in the Constitution, he
allegedly replied, speaking for many of his liberal colleagues, ‘We forgot.’”
No comments:
Post a Comment