The Faiths Of The Founding Fathers

by tristero

Most readers of blogs like this one know that the question “Was the US founded as a Christian nation?” is a joke. Not so many a newspaper editor or tv producer, who regularly permit the likes of James Dobson or Tim LaHaye to get away with asserting without contradiction that the founders were devout Christians. David L. Holmes’s happily concise new book, The Faiths of the Founding Fathers should serve as a useful corrective. He doesn’t exactly come out and say that the christianists are lying about the religious beliefs of the Founders, but that’s only because he doesn’t have to. The facts he amasses speak for themselves. However, given the nearly telegraphic, dispassionate style of the book (it contains neither an introduction nor a final chapter to summarize and assess what’s discussed), some reading-betwixt-the-lines and deduction is called for, on occasion. The book is packed with information, but I’ll discuss only one part of it here, which I think is the core of the book.

What were the Founders’ faith? In a chapter amusingly entitled “A Layperson’s Guide to Distinguishing a Deist From an Orthodox Christian,” Holmes, a professor of Religious Studies at William and Mary, writes

The religious beliefs of the founders seem to have fallen into three categories: Non-Christian Deism, Christian Deism, and orthodox Christianity.

What’s Deism? Holmes quotes the immortal Tom Paine:

Its creed is pure and sublimely simple. It believes in God and there it rests. It honours Reason [and] it avoids all presumptuous beliefs and rejects, as the fabulous inventions of men, all books pretending to revelation.

In his comments elsewhere, Holmes explicitly states that Deism cannot be considered a Christian religion as it rejects too much that is explicitly Christian, including the divine authority of the Bible. In other words, Deism’s pretty close to the bare minimum one can believe if one claims to be at all religious.

“Orthodox Christianity” is kind of a vague, catch-all term that includes both Roman Catholic and Protestant beliefs (it has nothing to do with Eastern Orthodox Christianity; it refers to how closely a belief system cleaves to western Christian orthodoxy). Unlike, perhaps, “Orthodox Judaism,” a follower of orthodox Christianity in Holmes’s sense need not be especially devout or observant, but rather must simply accept as true at least some aspects of the New Testament or traditional Christian belief. For instance, if you accept Jesus’s divinity but not the doctrine of transubstantiation, you could be thought an orthodox Christian, according to the way Holmes uses it, as opposed to a radical Deist.

Occasionally, I’ve seen the term used by christianists to confuse people, but Holmes, who is no christianist, uses “orthodox Christian” in a very specfic way, essentially to differentiate styles (or depths) of Deistic belief. In other words, when it comes to the Founders, Deism is the normative religious belief system, not Christianity. Therefore, the concept of some kind of generalized “orthodox Christianity” is helpful, not in uniting Christians politically as the christianists desire, but solely in demonstrating how the Founders’ beliefs deviate from strictly defined Deism. The term simply serves Holmes’ purpose in pointing to ways that the Founders privileged the New Testament and the Hebrew Bible in various subtle, perhaps even unconscious, ways. As his book makes abundantly clear, nearly all of the major male figures involved in the Revolution were Deists.* However, it wasn’t a consistent or organized theology; almost by definition, it couldn’t be. Many of them went to at least some church services (even if they didn’t take Communion) or maintained ties to the church of their youth. Many, including Franklin, held to beliefs that, strictly speaking, weren’t reasonable but supernatural. These are, according to Holmes, intimations of Orthodox Christianity within their Deism. They modulate their Deism and give some of the Founder’s beliefs a “Christian Deist” bent. But that does not make them pious, devout, or practicing Christians. Holmes goes to considerable lengths to demonstrate that assertions of specifically Christian piety for many of the Founders are baseless.

The religious beliefs of the Founders were highly individualized, and often a contradictory muddle, like the beliefs of most Americans today, and quite unlike the sclerotic and highly politicized irrationalism of modern christianists. Indeed, after finishing Holmes’ book, one can’t escape the conclusion that the decision to omit explicitly Christian references from the Declaration of Independence (and insert explicitly Deistic ones) was deliberate and supported even by those Founders with radically different beliefs, such as Jefferson and Adams. Furthermore, the fact that God is not mentioned in the Constitution was also deliberate. “We forgot,” Hamilton once quipped. Well, perhaps they did, but certainly on purpose.

But as I read him, Holmes goes even further. It is abundantly clear from the structure of the book, only in the most general sense are the three categories Holmes proposes (Deist, Deist Christian, orthodox Christian) equally populated by influential Founders. In fact, most of the “orthodox Christians” were women who, like it or not, had no direct power.** In short, regarding religion, Christianity per se was important to the mindset of the most influential founders, but more important still was the non-Christian religion of Deism, which most believed to a greater or lesser extent.***

And so, once again, when one examines the hysterical debates perpetrated on the country by the extreme Right, there is no there there. Yes, of course, it is a mistake to equate the non-rigorous religious thinking of the Founders with atheism or “secularism.” But here’s the point: Holmes can’t find anyone important to quote who makes such a basic error, not even the “secular humanist” journal Free Inquiry. Yes, as quoted in Holmes’ book, Gordon C. Wood, in The Radicalism of the American Revolution, appears to overstate the case for the Founders’ disinterest in organized religion and belief. However, Holmes cites numerous cases of important figures in the Revolution who avoided religous confirmation or failed to mention the consolations of religion at moments of personal crisis. Conclusion: Wood certainly did not exaggerate by much.

On the other hand, the quotes Holmes provides from the christianist LaHaye’s writings – “even secular humanists would have to admit to the religious (particularly Christian) origins of this nation” – stands exposed as just so much wildly inaccurate blather. Far more important to the origins of “this nation” is the liberal project of the Enlightenment, particularly Deism and perhaps most importantly, the consummately Enlightenment values of religious freedom and toleration (not the same thing). These values, clearly at the core of nearly every Founders’ political credo, are nowhere close to being a central part of orthodox Christianity, where the divinity of Christ, belief in the Bible’s authority, and belief in the moral truth of Christ’s and Paul’s teachings hold sway.

Holmes’s book also has a notable Epilogue in which he briefly describes the religious life of every president from Ford to the present one. Most readers of this blog will probably find that he is grossly unfair to the Democrats.**** But what I also noticed was a much stronger level of criticism of Republicans (even of Reagan!) than is common in many books that examine religion and politics from a religious/evangelical perspective. And so, whatever reservations I might have about certain details, I couldn’t help concluding that the entire book was a stinging critique of the religous right, written in a non-polemical style to attract those people – such as network tv producers, Fox News types, and the more gullible segments of their audience – who may have been bamboozled into taking scoundrels like LaHaye, Dobson, Falwell, and Robertson as serious theologians or social commentators.

If you have any interest in the religious beliefs of the Founders or any doubt as to how idiotic the notion that the US was founded as a Christian nation really is, you really should pick up this short, and intelligently written, book.

*The three most notable exceptions in Holmes’ book were Samuel Adams, John Jay, and Patrick Henry. As was Elias Boudinot, the president of the Continental Congress and a foe of Paine’s. The presidents were all Deists of one stripe or another.

**Holmes provides several good reasons why a disparity of belief along gender lines occurred. What were they? Read the book (grin).

***Was the US founded as a Deist nation? That’s a slightly more interesting question, perhaps, than whether it was founded as Christian nation, but the answer is emphatically “no.” Holmes’s book makes clear that the Founders had as little interest in foisting Deism on Americans as they did Christianity. The US was established as a civil government that deliberately separated church from state. Duh.

**** He makes a minor error, neglecting to mention that William Sloane Coffin had no recollection of a conversation in which Bush claims that Reverend Coffin insulted his father. As discussed elsewhere, I go further that that and strongly suspect Bush was lying.

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