Exchange on Religion and our Founding:

Here is a letter that I received from a friend named Roger (real first name, not disclosing his last name to protect his anonymity). My response follows:

Hi Jon,

You have told us something of Jefferson, whom I knew to hold the Church in some disdain, but you have said little yet about John Adams, who remained a devout Christian all his life. Is there a handy record of any public arguments Adams must have had with Jefferson and others on this issue? Was Adams ignored, hooted down, or did he come actually to agree with Jefferson's point of view in the end?

Here is Adams expressing some of his ideas for celebrating Independence Day before it became known as "The Fourth of July:"

"The second day of July, 1776 will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance by solemn acts of devotion to God, Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, bells, bonfires and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forevermore. You will think me transported with enthusiasm, but I am not. I am well aware of the toil and blood and treasure it cost us to maintain this Declaration [of Independence] and support and defend these States. Yet through all the gloom I can see the rays of ravishing light and glory. I can see that the end is worth all the means; and that posterity will triumph in that day's transaction, even tho [sic] we should rue it, which I trust in God we shall not."

- John Adams (1735 - 1826)

Adams was an equally important influence in our founding as Jefferson, though not as popular or well known.

I received your Jefferson quotation about the need to include ALL religions in our Bill of Rights, but earnestly believe he and the other founders could not possibly have known what they were talking about when they gave Mohammedanism and other bizarre occult creeds constitutional protection, because the essence of Islam, as we have learned to our sorrow, is diametrically opposed to the very principles the founders sought to establish, while Christianity is not.

I too reject the modern fundamentalist brand of "Christianity" embraced by our friend C. [an interlocutor of ours], but I probably disagree with you in that I firmly believe in the concept of "Social Christianity" (my term) which recognizes that even those atheists and other avowed skeptics and non-believers brought up in a predominantly Christian society do in the main develop what-I-would--have-to-call a Christian Conscience as if by osmosis. Without the subtle-but-ever-present influence of Christianity we would soon lapse into barbarism.

And, if Moses did not receive the Ten Commandments directly from the mouth of God, as stated in Scripture, he surely got them from searching the depths of his own soul and by using good old-fashioned Common Sense. The Decalogue surely IS the basis for English Common Law and subsequently our own system of Jurisprudence. The Decalogue is eminently humane and based on Common Sense.

Fundamentalism is virulently anti-intellectual, as we know, and Christianity as largely practiced in Mediaeval and Renaissance Europe had developed into just another cruelly corrupt system of wielding power over the masses, which is what all long-established practices tend to do once they become powerful. The questions we need to ask, however, is what do we really mean when we use the term "God" before we decide to reject Him? Few ever bother to think that through.

In my admittedly eccentric view, "God" is a catch-all term we use to identify certain primary motivating forces without which life, as we know it, would be impossible. But, this does not meant that "God" is a mere invention of the human intellect, because whenever one goes back far enough and digs deeply enough, one can never get past the question of how the elements came to be formed in the first place, and why was human life imbued with consciousness, imagination, humor, a capacity for developing a conscience and an insatiable desire for knowledge and greater understanding?

Whatever else one can say, the fact remains that WE DID NOT CREATE OURSELVES, nor did we create the world in which we live. That leads me always to one inescapable conclusion: There is an Intelligent Force at work which is greater by far than the human mind. Just looking at the beauty, perfect symmetry and infinite variety of a random sampling of hexagonal snowflakes under a microscope is enough to tell me that.

Facts are great as far as they go, but it is our need and ability to interpret facts and to discover their origins and reason for being that makes us special and significant.

Good night, my friend.

All the best,

Roger

My response:

I'd have to do some research regarding Jefferson's communications with Adams. I know they did communicate—write letters, etc.—throughout their lives. And I also know that Jefferson came to despise what Adams did during his presidency where Adams supported Alien & Sedition laws that Jefferson thought to be grossly unconstitutional.

As to whether our legal order was initially intended to protect the religious liberty of non-Christian religions, Jefferson & Madison, and others who were disciples of Locke, thought it necessary to protect non-Christian sects because (all) "religion," we now learned, was a matter of "opinion," as opposed to "knowledge," (what it used to be under the old order). And this in turned required a "separation of Church & State" that consigned "religion" to the private sphere of life.

Now, some/many founders probably didn't hold to this view and wanted the rights of religious liberty & conscience applied to Christians only (perhaps only to Protestants). Similarly many back in the day took it for granted that the "Creator" in the Declaration was the God of the Bible. Yet, the Bible is NOT the source of "rights" theory. And the originators of "rights theory"—Hobbes, Locke, et al.—clearly denied the Christian God.

I know this can get complicated. Michael Novak criticizes this view that I posit (he's actually criticizing what Walter Berns has written, and I get much of my argument from Berns), that the Founders were doing something, "disguised" by implementing Locke's view while trying not to seem like Heretics. Allan Bloom has written that our Founders followed Locke, et al., but he hinted that some of them might not have completely understood what they were doing. Jefferson, Madison, and others certainly understood. But some, the ones who were devout orthodox Christians, might not have.

The Founders, who by in large accepted the philosophers’ state of nature teachings and acting consistent with them (for instance, securing the “consent of the governed”), did have to “sell” Locke’s teachings to a public constituted by many orthodox Christians. And obviously, the Founders were successful. They sold to a Christian public ideas that clearly were non-Christian (in their origin). Enlightenment theory was so convincing that orthodox Christian ministers incorporated such teachings into their sermons. The following passage from Berns's Making Patriots about John Witherspoon—a founder and a Presbyterian minister often referred to as a “Calvinist,” who was the President and professor at Princeton University (then the College of NJ) and taught many of our founders including Madison—is telling:

“Witherspoon could speak unreservedly of ‘natural liberty’ and ‘natural rights’; and of the ‘state of nature’ and like Locke…of its ‘inconveniences,’ inconveniences that caused men to leave it for the ‘social state.’ But in the same lecture he could admonish his listeners and readers to accept ‘Christ Jesus as he is offered in the gospel,’ for ‘except that a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.’ In a word, Witherspoon saw no conflict between the new political philosophy and the old religion, which is to say between the principles set down in the Declaration of Independence and what he understood as orthodox Christianity.” p. 42.

This in turn brings to mind something that Allan Bloom wrote in The Closing of the American Mind: “When bishops, a generation after Hobbes’s death, almost naturally spoke in the language of the state of nature, contract and rights, it was clear that he had defeated the ecclesiastical authorities, who were no longer able to understand themselves as they once had.” p. 141.

There are some today who attempt to act as a bridge between Enlightenment Era "rights" teachings and orthodox Christianity claiming that "Reason & Revelation" largely agree on matters and that Christianity properly understood is perfectly consistent with, even demands, a Lockean order.

Locke did say, as does the Declaration repeating him, that rights ultimately come from God. And this is one thing that orthodox Christians use to attempt to connect their theology with our Constitutional order. The problem with this is Locke's doctrines are nowhere to be found in the Bible, and Locke appealed to Reason, unaided by Revelation in order to “discover” these principles.

If Christianity properly understood means informing religious beliefs by Reason unaided by Biblical Revelation and perhaps even taking passages of the Bible with a grain of salt in order to incorporate new teachings, then I'd say that yes, Christianity is compatible with our Enlightenment order (this sounds similar to your version of Christianity). But if Christianity properly understood means a literal interpretation of the Bible, and that's all you need for all of the answers, (C.'s kind of faith), then I'd say that this form of the faith has little or NO connection with our Founding order.

I think the bottom line is this: Our founders implemented a Lockean order. Many of our founders were devout Christians and intended "rights" to be granted to Christians, perhaps Protestants only. And they probably took it for granted, without any real religious doctrinal support, that the "Creator" was the Biblical God. But the philosophers they followed denied the Christian God and did intend to go further and consign religion to the private sphere and grant rights to all religions, giving Christianity the same legal status as "Hinduism." (At least this was the ideal, even if that ideal couldn't reasonably be implemented at that time). And some of the founders—Madison, Jefferson, Mason, perhaps they were a MINORITY* of founders—knew exactly what they were doing. So to whom do we give proper interpretive authority? The philosophers who formulated the ideas that our Founders implemented and the framers of our founding documents who best understood them. Or the other framers (perhaps they were a majority*) who wanted to implement a "half-digested" version of rights theory that applies them only to White Christian Protestant Propertied Males.

* I don’t mean to endorse the notion that Madison's & Jefferson’s views weren’t dominant. I am merely raising that possibility.

Best,

Jon