A Unitarian in Politics?

Hamilton, like Madison, Washington and other notable key American founders, for most of his life, especially when he did his work founding America, systematically spoke in generic, philosophical terms about God. I haven't found any "smoking gun" quotations of his that explicitly deny the tenets of orthodox Christianity as I have with Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin. However, Hamilton, likewise never affirmed those tenets (or joined a Christian Church) until the very end of his life after his son was killed in a duel. He was actually refused communion at his deathbed because he lacked an established track record of a Christian faith.

So why would Madison, Washington, Hamilton, G. Morris and a few others constantly speak, publicly, about God in a generic sense, and leave no evidence in their private letters of orthodox Trinitarian faith? Few appreciate the context that reveals the answer. Orthodox Trinitarianism had been legally established at the state level when America was British Colonies, and as such possessed social and institutional power. If you weren't orthodox Trinitarian, you were an "infidel." Yet, the elite Whigs who founded America were disproportionately imbibed in these "infidel" principles (deism, unitarianism, Arminianism, and universalism). In the late 18th Century, one could not wear his infidelity on his sleeve. By founding America on the unalienable rights of conscience, America's founders hoped folks (like them) could be open heretics and infidels. As Jefferson put it in 1822, "there is not a young man now living in the US who will not die an Unitarian." Though he was wrong in his prediction, by this time Harvard had become Unitarian, and Unitarians had transformed, at the social level, from non-Christian "infidels" as they were viewed in the 18th Century, to some respectable form of liberal Protestant Christianity, as they were thought of in New England in the 19th Century. Today, Arminianism ceases to be viewed as heresy altogether in many, but not all, orthodox Christian circles.

As it were, I believe Washington, Madison, G. Morris, James Wilson, and Hamilton (before his end of life conversion to orthodox Trinitarianism) secretly held to these theologically unitarian-rationalist principles. They couldn't be open about it because had they been, their public reputations, which they guarded with their lives, would have been damaged.

In doing research I found a 1791 letter from Fisher Ames to Alexander Hamilton where Ames states, "I know that you are as much an Unitarian in politics as I am...." The context is the discussion of a national bank, not religion. I am struck as to what it means to be a "Unitarian in politics" said in the context of not discussing religion. The best answer I can give is that the founders thought of themselves as "liberals," not like today's leftist liberals, but classical liberals. And as such, they tended to be theological liberals as well (again, not quite like today's theological liberals, but 18th Century theological liberals). Deism, unitarianism, universalism, Arminianism, and rationalism were the "liberal" religious tenets of the day. Calvinism was the antithesis of 18th Century religious liberalism.

If the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Federalist Papers had any kind of undergirding theology which animated them, it was not orthodox Trinitarian Christianity, but the above mentioned theologically liberal creeds. What Gregg Frazer terms "theistic rationalism," or what America's founders might have termed "Unitarianism," or "Christianity," "pure" and "uncorrupted" (uncorrupted by its tenets of orthodoxy that is). Unitarianism or theistic rationalism was, as such, the political theology of the US Founding. That's perhaps why unitarians Hamilton and Ames could view themselves as "unitarians" or "liberals" in politics as well as in religion. They went together hand in hand.