Posted by
Cal on Tuesday, December 19, 2006 12:40:19 AM
Christopher Hitchens’ aforementioned Weekly Standard column “God of Our Fathers” (a review of Brooke Allen’s Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers) attempts to make the case that America’s Founding Fathers were not religious and wanted to “insulate faith from politics.” Below is my dissection of the piece (Hitchens' words are in red):
Why should we care what the Founding Fathers believed, or did not believe, about religion? They went to such great trouble to insulate faith from politics, and took such care to keep their own convictions private, that it would scarcely matter if it could now be proved that, say, George Washington was a secret Baptist.
“Insulate faith from politics”? Not exactly. In his Farewell Address, President Washington articulated a belief echoed by all the Framers:
“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of Patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great Pillars of human happiness, these firmness props of the duties of Men and Citizens. The mere Politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity…reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”
The ancestor of the American Revolution was the English Revolution of the 1640s, whose leaders and spokesmen were certainly Protestant fundamentalists, but that did not bind the Framers and cannot be said to bind us, either. Indeed, the established Protestant church in Britain was one of the models which we can be quite sure the signatories of 1776 were determined to avoid emulating.
Correct, but nobody disputes this. As we will see below, Hitchens likes to employ a bait-&-switch on the reader: using the concept of an official state church interchangeably with that of religion itself, and using the Framers’ disdain for the former to claim they also disdained the latter, which was hardly the case.
Moreover, the 18th-century scholars and gentlemen who gave us the U.S. Constitution were in a relative state of innocence respecting knowledge of the cosmos, the earth, and the psyche, of the sort that has revolutionized the modern argument over faith. Charles Darwin was born in Thomas Jefferson's lifetime (on the very same day as Abraham Lincoln, as it happens), but Jefferson's guesses about the fossils found in Virginia were to Darwinism what alchemy is to chemistry. And the insights of Einstein and Freud lay over a still more distant horizon.
If the intended implication is that scientific knowledge & religious belief are incompatible, it’s false. Radio host Dennis Prager recently had an excellent debate with leading atheist Sam Harris on the matter (and no, Prager is not a bigot), and theological philosopher Peter Kreeft has many fabulous logic-based cases for God.
The furthest that most skeptics could go was in the direction of an indeterminate deism, which accepted that the natural order seemed to require a designer but did not necessitate the belief that the said designer actually intervened in human affairs.
That’s odd, because the real-life Framers went a good deal farther than that:
John Adams, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, 4/19/1817: “Without religion, the world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite company.”
Ben Franklin, in a letter to Joseph Huey, 6/6/1753: “Even the mixed, imperfect pleasures we enjoy in this world, are rather from God’s goodness than our merit.” To the Constitutional Convention, 6/28/1787: “I have lived, Sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth—that God Governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?”
Patrick Henry, to the 2nd Virginia Convention, 3/23/1775: “Sir, we are not weak, if we make a proper use of the means which the God of nature hath placed in our power…Besides, sir, we shall not fight our battle alone. There is a just God who presides over the destinies of nations; and who will raise up friends to fight our battle for us.”
Thomas Jefferson, in Notes on the State of Virginia, 1781: “Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the Gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath?”
You get the idea. And there’s plenty more where that came from.
Invocations such as "nature's god" were partly intended to hedge this bet, while avoiding giving offense to the pious. Even Thomas Paine, the most explicitly anti-Christian of the lot, wrote The Age of Reason as a defense of god from those who traduced him in man-made screeds like the Bible.
Our forefathers’ religious rhetoric was little more than window dressing they didn’t really believe? Considering that many of their most explicitly religious words come from their personal diaries & private correspondences, I have trouble believing Hitchens makes an honest mistake here. Now, Paine is an interesting case. Steve Farrell wrote three articles (#1, #2, and #3) exploring his faith. The main points: The Age of Reason earned him nothing but disagreement (at best) and disgrace from his countrymen. Moreover, Paine himself came to reject it: “I would give worlds, if I had them, if The Age of Reason had never been published. O Lord, help! Stay with me! It is hell to be left alone.”
Considering these limitations, it is quite astonishing how irreligious the Founders actually were. You might not easily guess, for example, who was the author of the following words:
Oh! Lord! Do you think that a Protestant Popedom is annihilated in America? Do you recollect, or have you ever attended to the ecclesiastical Strifes in Maryland Pensilvania [sic], New York, and every part of New England? What a mercy it is that these People cannot whip and crop, and pillory and roast, as yet in the U.S.! If they could they would. . . . There is a germ of religion in human nature so strong that whenever an order of men can persuade the people by flattery or terror that they have salvation at their disposal, there can be no end to fraud, violence, or usurpation.
That was John Adams, in relatively mild form. He was also to point out, though without too much optimism, the secret weapon that secularists had at their disposal--namely the profusion of different religious factions.
The multitude and diversity of them, You will say, is our Security against them all. God grant it. But if We consider that the Presbyterians and Methodists are far the most numerous and the most likely to unite; let a George Whitefield arise, with a military cast, like Mahomet, or Loyola, and what will become of all the other Sects who can never unite?
Here’s the bait-&-switch I mentioned. Yes, Adams criticized abuses of religious authority & faith’s potential for ill as well as good. But the vast majority of the devout would readily acknowledge that because the Word of God holds such incredible promise, it demands responsibility on the part of the fallible mortals who spread it. There’s nothing inconsistent with Adams’ genuine faith here.
George Whitefield was the charismatic preacher who is so superbly mocked in Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography. Of Franklin it seems almost certainly right to say that he was an atheist (Jerry Weinberger's excellent recent study Benjamin Franklin Unmasked being the best reference here).
To call Benjamin Franklin an atheist is a lie, and a blatant one too—Franklin’s own autobiography (which Hitchens has presumably read) leaves no ambiguity on the matter: “I had been religiously educated as a Presbyterian; and though some of the dogmas of that persuasion…appeared to me unintelligible, others doubtful, and I early absented myself from the public assemblies of the sect, Sunday being my studying day, I was never without religious principles. I never doubted, for instance, the existence of the Deity; that he made the world, and governed it by his Providence; that the most acceptable service of God was the doing good to man; that our souls are immortal; and that all crime will be punished, and virtue rewarded, either here or hereafter…”
[B]ut the master tacticians of church-state separation, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, were somewhat more opaque about their beliefs. In passing the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom--the basis of the later First Amendment--they brilliantly exploited the fear that each Christian sect had of persecution by the others. It was easier to get the squabbling factions to agree on no tithes than it would have been to get them to agree on tithes that might also benefit their doctrinal rivals. In his famous "wall of separation" letter, assuring the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, of their freedom from persecution, Jefferson was responding to the expressed fear of this little community that they would be oppressed by--the Congregationalists of Connecticut.
Funny he should mention the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. Invoking it as a foundational block of church-state separation has been tried before—the history book we used in AP US History sums it up in characteristically-vague & misleading fashion: “The struggle for divorce between religion and government proved fiercest in Virginia. It was prolonged to 1786, when freethinking Thomas Jefferson and his co-reformers, including the Baptists, won a complete victory with the passage of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom.” In fact, the VSRF’s text offers quite the rationale for religious freedom:
“Well aware…that Almighty God hath created the mind free, and manifested his supreme will that free it shall remain by making it altogether insusceptible of restraint; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments, or burdens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, who being lord of both body and mind, yet choose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do, but to exalt it by its influence on reason alone…We the General Assembly of Virginia do enact that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, [etc.].”
The “wall of separation” letter has similarly been taken out of context. Jefferson was speaking of a wall between two organizations: the church and the state. Simply put, neither can have power over the affairs of the other—a far cry from the modern distortion (advanced by Justice Hugo Black, an ex-Klansman whom the aforementioned textbook describes only as “a New Dealer,” by the way) that religious values shouldn’t guide public officials or cultivate a national morality.
This same divide-and-rule tactic may have won him the election of 1800 that made him president in the first place. In the face of a hysterical Federalist campaign to blacken Jefferson as an infidel, the Voltaire of Monticello appealed directly to those who feared the arrogance of the Presbyterians. Adams himself thought that this had done the trick.
“With the Baptists, Quakers, Methodists, and Moravians,” he wrote, “as well as the Dutch and German Lutherans and Calvinists, it had an immense effect, and turned them in such numbers as decided the election. They said, let us have an Atheist or Deist or any thing rather than an establishment of Presbyterianism.”
The essential point--that a religiously neutral state is the chief guarantee of religious pluralism—is the one that some of today's would-be theocrats are determined to miss.
I must confess, I’m not really qualified to comment on Election 1800, though Hitchens take sounds about right. But the existence of anti-Presbyterian prejudice doesn’t negate the Founders’ belief that a God did indeed exist to Whom America owed a great deal, and that vibrant religious principles were essential to good government & virtuous society. This isn’t incompatible with religious freedom at all.
Brooke Allen misses no chance to rub it in, sometimes rather heavily stressing contemporary “faith-based” analogies. She is especially interesting on the extent to which the Founders felt obliged to keep their doubts on religion to themselves. Madison, for example, did not find himself able, during the War of 1812, to refuse demands for a national day of prayer and fasting. But he confided his own reservations to his private papers, published as "Detached Memoranda" only in 1946. It was in those pages, too, that he expressed the view that to have chaplains opening Congress, or chaplains in the armed forces, was unconstitutional.
I don’t know what Madison wrote about chaplains. I do know, however, that he told the Virginia General Assembly the following in 1785: “It is the duty of every man to render to the Creator such homage…Before any man can be considered as a member of Civil Society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governor of the Universe.” And that he told Frederick Beasley (in a personal letter, 11/20/1825): “The belief in a God All Powerful wise and good, is so essential to the moral order of the World and to the happiness of man, that arguments which enforce it cannot be drawn from too many sources nor adapted with too much solicitude to the different characters and capacities to be impressed with it.”
Of all these pen-portraits of religious reservation, the one most surprising to most readers will probably be that of George Washington. While he was president, he attended the Reverend James Abercrombie's church, but on "sacramental Sundays" left the congregation immediately before the taking of communion. When reproached for this by the good Reverend, he acknowledged the reproof--and ceased attending church at all on those Sundays which featured "the Lord's supper." To do otherwise, as he put it, would be "an ostentatious display of religious zeal arising altogether from his elevated station."
Washington’s “religious reservation” is surprising, all right…mostly because it’s phony. Consider Washington’s stirring defense of religion above. Near Valley Forge, Pastor Henry Muhlenberg said: “I heard a fine example today…General Washington rode around among his army yesterday and admonished each and every one to fear God, to put away the wickedness that has set in and become so general, and to practice the Christian virtues. From all appearances, this gentleman does not belong to the so-called world of society, for he respects God’s Word, believes in the atonement through Christ, and bears himself in humility and gentleness.”
Washington was a devout man. How could he be otherwise? He saw the Hand of God firsthand. On 7/9/1755, during the French & Indian War, Washington escaped a devastating bloodbath, in which every other horse-ridden officer was killed, unscathed. On July 18, he wrote to his brother John: “But by the all-powerful dispensations of Providence, I have been protected beyond all human probability or expectation; for I had four bullets through my coat, and two horses shot under me, yet escaped unhurt, although death was leveling my companions on every side of me!”
Jefferson was content to take part in public religious observances and to reserve his scorn and contempt for Christianity for his intimate correspondents, but our first president would not give an inch to hypocrisy. In that respect, if in no other, the shady, ingratiating Parson Weems had him right.
On 4/21/1803, Jefferson wrote the following to Benjamin Rush (but may as well have been directly addressing Hitchens): “My views…are the result of a life of inquiry and reflection, and very different from the anti-christian system imputed to me by those who know nothing of my opinions. To the corruptions of Christianity I am, indeed, opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian in the only sense in which he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines in preference to all others…”
Whether or not Jefferson believed in Christ’s divinity doesn’t change the fact that he believed God did indeed exist, and that religion was “deemed in other countries incompatible with good government and yet proved by our experience to be its best support.”
Hitchens continues on for a few more paragraphs of a similar bent, ending with a rallying cry to “Build up that wall!” Give me a break (sorry I'm not finishing it, but the manure was getting a little too deep. You can read the whole thing at the above link).
I don’t mean to suggest that all the Framers were in lockstep on religion. But the evidence overwhelmingly shows they agreed that God was real, that He did play a role in America’s birth, and that religious principles were an essential good to a free & moral nation.
“We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all of our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind for self-government; upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God.”—JAMES MADISON, 1778