Every successful politics in America today is a Christian politics. Sure, there are a few congressmen from exceptionally liberal districts who subscribe to more exotic faiths or leave the question of religion unanswered altogether. But the vast majority of politicos — be they Democrats, Republicans, or Independents — wear their Christianity on the sleeve.
When President Obama delivers a public address, he often invokes the New Testament, Isaiah and Corinthians being his go-to texts as of late. Within his own party — supposedly the camp of the secularists — only one congressman self-identifies as an atheist, which is one more than the number of Republicans that do so. On the Right, the mixing of Christianity and politics is a source of pride, and — many conservatisms being synonymous with traditionalism — GOPers often portray faith-based politics as an integral component of our heritage.
Inveighing against a 1960 speech by John F. Kennedy, former Senator Rick Santorum claimed in a conversation with George Stephanopoulos last year: “The idea that the church can have no influence or no involvement in the operation of the state is absolutely antithetical to the objectives and vision of our country.” Newt Gingrich, in the wake of his primary run, has carved out a post-politics career trying to meld faith and civil affairs in the name of our supposedly pious Fathers. And Rick Perry, for his part, epitomized this conservative fusion of American heritage and political piety, proclaiming, in a television ad released near the end of his campaign, “Faith made our nation strong. It can make her strong again.”
The quotes above are many months old, but there remains only one atheist in Congress, godless Americans are still unrepresented, and the pundits advocating for a fusion of religion and civil affairs still rest their argument on tradition.
Those bent on melding faith and civic life certainly have intellectual legs to stand on: many scholars, classical and contemporary, have posited Judeo-Christian values as the common ground upon which a Western, democratic society must cohere. However, the line of argument they have chosen to pursue — that our Founders would have condoned this civil-religious fusion — is pure nonsense.
As any high school history student can tell you, our founding statesmen were children of the Enlightenment. And the overarching goal of this movement was, in the words of political theorist Richard Tuck, the “destruction of irrationality, superstition, and myth.”
Everywhere from Boston to Philadelphia to the backwoods of Vermont, our Founding Fathers were promoting the sanctity of reason, which they saw as irreconcilable with faith. In his pamphlet, The Age of Reason, polemicist and patriot Thomas Paine described the Bible as a work of literature, nothing more, and he regarded man’s intellect as his only rightful source of ‘Truth.’ He also repeatedly expressed his disenchantment with organized religion, at one point writing, “I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any Church that I know of. My own mind is my own Church. Each of those churches accuse the other of unbelief; and for my own part, I disbelieve them all.”
A member of the Christian Right might claim that Paine represented the secularist, elitist extreme, but the fact of the matter is that his ideas were wildly popular among all segments of the population. The Age of Reason, printed three times from 1792 to 1807 and written for the common man, was a runaway bestseller among the revolutionary masses of the eastern Seaboard. Furthermore, it was far from the only work of its kind.
Ethan Allen, the man more or less responsible for the founding of Vermont and the evacuation of the Brits from Boston Harbor, penned a similar pamphlet in 1785 titled, Reason: The Only Oracle of Man, in which he tore into Christianity with biting Yankee frankness. Jefferson, perhaps taking a cue from Allen and Paine, who both saw the Bible as hogwash, published what is now known as ‘Jefferson’s Bible.’ His version stripped the text of almost all supernatural references, leaving it as a survey of the morals and philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth. Though the humane message is still there, the miracles are not. Of the Holy Trinity itself, Jefferson wrote, “It is too late in the day for men of sincerity to pretend they believe in the Platonic mysticisms that three are one, and one is three; and yet the one is not three, and the three are not one.”
It was not only the illogicality of faith that our Founding Fathers found objectionable, but also its effects on civil society and social interaction. Though Weber would critique many of their assessments 200 years later, many early American freethinkers saw religion as a vehicle for political hysteria and economic sloth. Complaining of the religiosity of his new nation, John Adams wrote in an 1817 letter to Jefferson:
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 is it 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.
Adams, a fiery Bostonian patriot, was known for his anti-religious screeds, and the above excerpt was far from his most impassioned. But even our less partisan Fathers decried any mixture of faith and politics, believing that the former degraded the quality of the latter. James Madison was among our more religious Founders, (though many historians believe him to have ‘converted’ to Deism later in life). Still, he would never have advocated any interplay between Church and State. In his Detached Memoranda, he decried the establishment of the congressional chaplaincy, and he also expressed his belief that military chaplaincies were unconstitutional. On the matter, he wrote: “To say that his religious principles are obnoxious or that his sect is small, is to lift the veil at once and exhibit in its naked deformity the doctrine that religious truth is to be tested by numbers, or that the major sects have a right to govern the minor.”
In other words, it would be a political “deformity” if the most practiced faith were to enjoy exalted status in law or in the political consciousness. Through their constant proselytization of Christian symbols, their recursive nods to the monotheistic ‘God,’ and their repeated attempts to institutionalize religion at the state level, most socially conservative politicos disagree. But they find themselves opposed to Madison, and almost every other early president, including Adams and Jefferson. Still, they have the nerve to rest upon the mantle of history when trying to theocratize the state.
If the Founding Fathers were such avid secularists, one may ask, why did they always reference a Creator-God. Why did almost all subscribe to Deism — which basically posits that God created us, but does not interfere with human events — rather than taking the leap to atheism, agnosticism, or some other form of unambiguous godlessness. Perhaps Christopher Hitchens answered this question best when he wrote of the late eighteenth century state of science in a 2006 issue of the Weekly Standard:
[The] 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 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. 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.
To be sure, some of our leaders, despite their relative “ignorance respecting knowledge of the cosmos,” were willing to commit to a disbelief more determinate than Deism. Benjamin Franklin, who is ironically Newt Gingrich’s intellectual hero, was almost certainly an atheist. And as the excerpts above have shown, even those early intellectuals that conceded the existence of a god, did so begrudgingly.
Madison, Paine, Allen, Franklin, Jefferson, Quincy and John Adams, and almost every other consequential figure of the American Enlightenment — as well as the thinkers on which they based their convictions: Rousseau, Voltaire, Montesquieu, etc. — hated organized religion, exalted reason, and saw no possibility for a mixture of the two, especially in civil affairs. In fact, one of the aspects that made the American Revolution, well, revolutionary, was the widespread elevation of the human mind over established creeds. It was this elevation of human reason that made rule by the masses sensible, and our Founding Fathers were openly nostalgic of the pre-Christian republics where man could reason out from underneath the yoke of an established Church. Along these lines, Jefferson wrote in 1821 of his goal to return the “human mind” to the “freedom it enjoyed 2000 years ago.” In other words, for Jefferson, and for most of his contemporaries, to be un-Christian was a prerequisite to be truly free.
So, let’s have a debate over religion and secularism in civil society. Reasonable arguments, I’m sure, can be put forth from both sides. But let’s not mutilate our history in the process. Our Founders didn’t want to endow us with a religion of any sort; rather, they sought to free us from faith, so that we might be able to steer our nation according to the dictates of reason, not the creeds of a church.
Photo credit: npr.org
