A Liberal
Dose
August 18,
2022
Troy D.
Smith
“The Faith
of the Founding Fathers”
Last week I talked about Christian Nationalism, the idea
the United States was expressly established to be a Christian nation, that
there should be no separation of church and state, that America is God’s Chosen
Country, and that allowing space for other religions (or no religion) weakens
the country and betrays what it stands for. I said it was not historical. Now
I’m going to explain why.
First, I’m going to recommend a book: The Faiths of
the Founding Fathers by David L. Holmes (2006, Oxford University Press). Holmes, like many others before him, examines
the context of those individuals’ public professions of faith -which many of
them made, and which are used as evidence they intended their new nation to be
a specifically Christian one. The “Founding Fathers” can be divided into three
categories: traditional mainstream Protestants (most notably Patrick Henry, and
also Samuel Adams), pure Deists (most notably, and vociferously, Thomas Paine),
and the category most of them fell into- Christian Deists, who were somewhere
in the middle. Now, to understand any of that, you have to know what a Deist
is. I know that many of you do, but many do not, so here goes.
Deism is a philosophy that arose in the early 1700s,
and was very popular among college instructors in the colonies (and remember,
from an earlier column, that the majority of the Founding Fathers had college
educations). It stated that reason alone demonstrates that there is a God, with
no need for a belief in the supernatural (remember, this time period was called
The Enlightenment, with an emphasis on logic and reason) -and therefore, no
need for organized religion. A Deist, therefore, was a lot more likely to speak
about the Creator, the Divine Author, Nature, or Providence than about “God.”
Most of the Founding Fathers encountered this idea at
university and were influenced by it thereafter, in various degrees. Most did
not follow the example of Paine, who went all-out on the notion and referred to
all religion as fable. Rather, they continued their association with churches
and thought of themselves as Christian -but you could not call them
fundamentalist or evangelical (both of which were terms that arose later
-Patrick Henry, though, was essentially a fundamentalist). These “Christian Deists” -George Washington,
Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and many more
-viewed church attendance as a good way to learn morality, ethics, and good
citizenship, and often spoke publicly about their belief in God and the value
of the Bible. But not in the way fundamentalist Christians of today (or then)
would do so. Their form of Deism, and of Christianity, is sometimes called “The
Clockwork Universe,” and it works like this:
God is the great Clockmaker. He designed the universe
and set it in motion so that it would work perfectly, with all the attendant
gears and springs propelling it along. And then He stepped back and is now just
letting it run. From this point of view, God’s greatest gift to us is our power
of reason -and it is up to us to use it, and solve our problems. So, when you
read a quote by Jefferson or Adams about The Creator, you must remember they
did not mean it the same way a fundamentalist preacher would. In many ways,
Christian Deists were a lot like Progressive Christians are today -and that
extends to religious tolerance.
Jefferson -who coined the term “wall of separation
between church and state” -said he did not care in the least whether his
neighbor worshiped one god, many gods, or no god: “It neither picks my pocket
nor breaks my leg.” In fact, a 1797 treaty endorsed by George Washington, signed
by President John Adams, and passed unanimously in the Senate stated that that
“the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”
Next time we’ll talk about what that means.
--Troy D.
Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at
Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.
You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE
A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE
Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com
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