Throckmorton: "From Barton to Scherr: Thomas Kidd on Various Visions of Thomas Jefferson"

I've been busy with work; but I wanted to make sure we didn't miss this controversy.

As Warren Throckmorton notes, "[w]hile I think Dreisbach could be more vocal in response to Barton, I agree with Kidd that Barton has found no scholarly support for The Jefferson Lies[,]" including Daniel Dreisbach.

Hammer Reviews Spellberg

As Andrew Sullivan informs, "Juliane Hammer reviews Denise A. Spellberg’s Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an, ..."

From the review:

It is this same sentiment that permeates Denise A. Spellberg’s new book, Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an: Islam and the Founders. In it, Spellberg offers a meticulously researched and incredibly detailed account not only of how Jefferson came to acquire a copy of the Qur’an in English but also of the broader historical circumstances of his political career and the role of religion in the period of the founding fathers. Spellberg develops a nuanced and insightful analysis of the seemingly contradicting attitudes towards Islam and Muslims displayed by Jefferson and his contemporaries as represented in historical records. The conundrums she sets out to explore are the following: Why did the founding fathers include the theoretical possibility of Muslims not only as citizens of the United States but as federal office holders (including the presidency) in their deliberations on the one hand, while demonstrating decidedly negative views of Islam (and Muslim political adversaries overseas) on the other? ...

Happy 271 to Thomas Jefferson

To celebrate, see from The Humanist here.

A taste:

Thomas Jefferson was editing the Bible, a book regarded by most of his fellow Americans as the word of God. The act was certainly presumptuous, perhaps blasphemous. But Jefferson found the task simple. The worthy parts of the Bible were easily distinguishable from the worthless—“as distinguishable,” he later wrote in a letter to John Adams, “as diamonds in a dunghill.”

Kidd: "The Quaker Contribution to Religious Liberty"

By Thomas Kidd here. A taste:

Quaker convictions about religious liberty, like Baptists’, emerged from the experience of persecution. ...

Brayton: "AHA Files Contempt Motion in Prayer Case" & Observations on J. Adams' Heterodox Theology

Read about it here.

I'm of two minds: On the one hand, I'm no fan of federal judges dictating prayers. On the other, I'm also not a fan of local government agencies dictating them either. A local government bureaucrat has no power to intentionally overrule a federal judge. Federal judges can enforce injunctions at the point of a gun. Were I the judge, this is how I would resolve it: I'd use my equitable powers to send in an official to pray a generic monotheistic, inclusive prayer that would cancel out the exclusivist Jesus language. And I'd have them come back a few times a year as long as the local bureaucrat insisted on Jesus only language.

Perhaps they could quote something from the "key Founders" that, unlike the George Washington spurious prayer, was actually uttered by them. Perhaps something from John Adams' letters written in 1813 like below.

Where is to be found theology more orthodox, or philosophy more profound, than in the introduction to the Shasta? "God is one, creator of all, universal sphere, without beginning, without end. God governs all the creation by a general providence, resulting from his eternal designs. Search not the essence and the nature of the Eternal, who is one; your research will be vain and presumptuous. It is enough, that, day by day and night by night, you adore his power, his wisdom, and his goodness, in his works. The Eternal willed, in the fulness of time, to communicate of his essence and of his splendor, to beings capable of perceiving it. They as yet existed not. The Eternal willed, and they were. He created Birma, Vitsnow, and Sib." These doctrines, sublime, if ever there were any sublime, Pythagoras learned in India, and taught them to Zaleucus and his other disciples.

Bill Fortenberry, friend of American Creation, may chime in and argue Adams' thoughts are somehow consistent with evangelical, biblical Christianity as he did here.

Adams at times (here, certainly) can be difficult to understand and Mr. Fortenberry's analysis did help me better understand the context, somewhat. When the militant unitarian Adams uses the term "orthodox" as he refers to a religion, he may mean 1. trinitarianism and cognate doctrines, something in which he did not believe (hence here the term "orthodox" would be something at least somewhat pejorative); or 2. something religiously good, something in which a unitarian like himself could endorse (hence the term "orthodox" would be something positive).

It's apparent from the context that Adams sees Hindu dogma to be equivalent to orthodox Trinitarian Christianity. He sees truth and error, positive and negative, in both. Adams, like the Hindus and Trinitarians believed that:

God is one, creator of all, universal sphere, without beginning, without end. God governs all the creation by a general providence, resulting from his eternal designs. Search not the essence and the nature of the Eternal, who is one; your research will be vain and presumptuous.

This is the part of the Shastra Adams believed to contain "philosophy ... profound."

But then:

The Eternal willed, in the fulness of time, to communicate of his essence and of his splendor, to beings capable of perceiving it. They as yet existed not. The Eternal willed, and they were. He created Birma, Vitsnow, and Sib." These doctrines, sublime, if ever there were any sublime, Pythagoras learned in India, and taught them to Zaleucus and his other disciples.

The notion of the eternal God being One, somehow becoming Three but still being One is what Adams thought "theology ... orthodox," something Adams rejected.

Whatever disagreements Adams had with fellow militant unitarian Joseph Priestley (and such disagreements were more political than theological) Adams endorsed Priestley's notion that the corrupt "orthodox" doctrine of the Trinity traces to Plato. Though Adams thought he could "one up" Priestley for failing to note Plato cribbed the Trinity from Pythagoras (aka the triangle guy).

So which part of Adams' musings make it into the government dictated prayer?

Article on Official Using GW's Phony Prayers

From the Baltimore Sun. A taste:

She said that she would be using the words of George Washington as she prayed, quoting, “I beseech thee, for the sake of him in whom thou art well pleased, the Lord Jesus Christ, to admit me to render thee deserved thanks and praises for thy manifold mercies extended toward me.” 

The text of the prayer matches that of one ascribed to Washington in a 1919 book, but William M. Ferraro an associate editor of the first president’s papers at the University of Virginia, said there is no evidence the words are his.

Be sure to read on and check for what Thomas Kidd has to say in the article.

The Humanist: "George Washington Never Wrote That Jesus Prayer"

Here. A taste:

But even if the prayer delivered by Commissioner Frazier had been genuine, perhaps thereby having some patriotic or historical significance, it wouldn’t have changed the legal picture. A continuous habit of delivering specifically Christian prayers at government meetings creates a hostile environment for non-Christian citizens, be they believers in other religions or nonbelievers.

How Christian Nationalist Historical Revisionism Harms

Or George Washington's phony prayers strike again. John Fea has the details here. It really harms in the sense that it motivated a public official into civil disobedience with its inherent consequences.

On a personal note, I have nothing against civil disobedience per se; but it's not something to take lightly. Certainly, one should base one's civil disobedience on accurate facts.

New Book From Hall, Dreisbach, et al.

It's entitled "Faith and the Founders of the American Republic." You can view the book's official website here.

Here is the description:

The role of religion in the founding of America has long been a hotly debated question. Some historians have regarded the views of a few famous founders, such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Thomas Paine, as evidence that the founders were deists who advocated the strict separation of church and state. Popular Christian polemicists, on the other hand, have attempted to show that virtually all of the founders were pious Christians in favor of public support for religion. 

As the essays in this volume demonstrate, a diverse array of religious traditions informed the political culture of the American founding. Faith and the Founders of the American Republic includes studies both of minority faiths, such as Islam and Judaism, and of major traditions like Calvinism. It also includes nuanced analysis of specific founders-Quaker John Dickinson, prominent Baptists Isaac Backus and John Leland, and Theistic Rationalist Gouverneur Morris, among others-with attention to their personal histories, faiths, constitutional philosophies, and views on the relationship between religion and the state. 

This volume will be a crucial resource for anyone interested in the place of faith in the founding of the American constitutional republic, from political, religious, historical, and legal perspectives.

Also be sure to check out the outstanding lineup of authors in the Table of Contents.

Newton Against the Trinity

This is an oldie but goody from Brandon at Siris. Newton was the quintessential Enlightenment thinker that America's Founders admired.

But as you can see from the link, Newton's Enlightenment, while heterodox and out of the box in its thinking, was also quite religious, "biblical" even.

A taste:

... Newton identifies a difference in how God and the Lamb are treated by the vision as objects of worship. (1) The Lamb does not sit on the Throne but stands by it; whereas the one on the throne (and who is therefore King over all who are not on the throne, including the Lamb) represents God. (2) In Newton's view, the doxologies that follow the investiture of the Lamb show a gradation, with God being given a "higher degree of worship" than the Lamb, a pattern that he thinks is repeated in Revelation 7.

Hal Lindsey Needs to Thank the Old School Unitarians and Universalists

They were apocalyptic. They were also the first who believed history would terminate in universal liberal democracy (i.e., "millennial republicanism").

From the above link:

The late eighteenth century was another age of widespread apocalyptic expectation, when the promise of the American Revolution, followed by the greater and more radical expectations raised by the early years of the French Revolution, revived among a number of English Nonconforming sects the millenarian excitement of Milton and other seventeenth-century predecessors. "Hey for the New Jerusalem! The millennium!" Thomas Holcroft exulted in 1791. [] Preachers such as Richard Price, Joseph Fawcett, and Elhanan Winchester, as well as Joseph Priestley, who was not only a great chemist but a founder of the Unitarian Society, all interpreted the convulsions in France in terms of the prophecies in both the Hebrew and the Christian Scriptures. They thus invested the political events of the day with the explosive power of the great Western myth of apocalypse and expanded a local phenomenon into the expectation that humanity, everywhere, was at the threshold of an earthly paradise.

Price, Fawcett, Winchester and Priestley were all theological unitarians and/or universalists.

Elhanan Winchester's Belief In Future Temporary Punishment

Winchester was Benjamin Rush's theological guru. The old school Universalists like Winchester were nonetheless hardcore in their belief in future prospective punishment for the "unsaved." As this source notes:

Among the early Universalists in America the doctrine of a limited term of punishment for the wicked in the future was not questioned. John Murray inherited the doctrine from his spiritual father, James Relly. Elhanan Winchester was of the same mind, and was even ready to suggest a matter of fifty thousand years as a possible limit.

The same source goes on to describe the "official doctrine" of one of the earliest "official" Universalist Churches in America:

As early as 1791, when the Philadelphia Convention was asked to define the position of the Universalist Church upon the question of future punishment, it made answer in this wise: 

"Unbelievers do die in their sins; such will not be purged of their sins or unbelief by death, but necessarily must appear in the next state under all the darkness, fear, and torment and conscious guilt, which is the natural consequence of unbelief in the truth. What may be the duration or degree of this state of unbelief and misery, we know not. But this we know, that it hath one uniform and invariable end; namely, the good of the creature."

That last part -- "the good of the creature" -- is telling. As per the Enlightenment custom, the God of the universalists was not unlike the God of the unitarians in the sense that benevolence was His defining attribute. Eternal punishment doesn't "fit" the "good of the creature" understanding.

Kabala on Miller

James S. Kabala reviews Nicholas P. Miller's, "The Religious Roots of the First Amendment: Dissenting Protestants and the Separation of Church and State." Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. 272 pp., $35. A taste:

Miller then uses chapters two through five to trace the development of Protestant-influenced ideas of private judgment and religious freedom in the thought and writings of seven key figures of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: John Locke, William Penn, Elisha Williams, Isaac Backus, William Livingston, John Witherspoon, and James Madison. (Williams, today probably the least-known figure of the seven, was a Connecticut legislator and former president of Yale who defended the rights of itinerant preachers during the Great Awakening and later published a broader work entitled Seasonable Plea for Liberty of Conscience.) Miller carefully assembles evidence that each of these figures was genuinely important (decrying the Supreme Court's fondness for citing Roger Williams rather than Penn and Thomas Jefferson rather than Madison) and that each came out of the tradition of dissenting Protestantism rather than of the Enlightenment. For example, he painstakingly documents that William Livingston, author of the essays in the Independent Reflector, was sometimes anti-clerical but never anti-religious.

Faith and History: "WHAT’S REALLY AT STAKE IN THE “CHRISTIAN AMERICA” DEBATE"

Here. A taste:

If Americans remembered George Washington as the sword of the Revolution, in other words, they venerated Jefferson as the pen. The general may have secured independence on the battlefield, but it was the sage of Monticello who (along with Thomas Paine) had justified the Revolution and explained its meaning to posterity. Ever since, Americans across the political spectrum–liberals and conservatives, Christians and secularists, patriots and cynics–have looked to Jefferson to define what the United States stood for at its birth.

Daily Beast: "What the Sex Lives of the Founding Fathers Reveal About Us"

Here. Sorry, I couldn't resist. A taste:

Neither has the lack of evidence stopped people from arguing that Alexander Hamilton was gay. [[H]istorian Thomas] Foster highlights the recent interest ... taken in homoerotic letters Hamilton wrote to John Laurens, a fellow soldier in the patriot army. One of them reads: “I wish, my dear Laurens, it were in my power, by actions, rather than words, to convince you that I love you.” 

Foster argues that it is certainly possible that Hamilton had a sexual relationship with Laurens. But ... [r]arely do ... [people asserting such] explore the nature of 18th century male friendship, which could be intensely romantic, even erotic, without including sex. “We’re not taking the complexities of 18th century love into account,” Foster said. “We’re forcing them into our model, and that’s basically what we’ve done throughout history.” 

Yet Foster does not let serious historians, either academic or popular, off the hook either. When it comes to the recent question of Hamilton’s sexual identity, he sympathizes with their reticence to say that Hamilton had sexual intercourse with Laurens. There is simply no evidence to prove it. And yet, he finds it hypocritical that many historians use the same kind of sexually charged letters Hamilton wrote to women as evidence that he was a very straight Lothario. “It just looks like such a double standard. What’s the level of evidence that you need to be certain that this was true love?” Foster said, in regard to his letters to Laurens.

Reason: "George Washington: Boozehound"

By Stanton Peele here. A taste:

Indeed, we still have available the list of beverages served at a 1787 farewell party in Philadelphia for George Washington just days before the framers signed off on the Constitution. According to the bill preserved from the evening, the 55 attendees drank 54 bottles of Madeira, 60 bottles of claret, eight of whiskey, 22 of porter, eight of hard cider, 12 of beer, and seven bowls of alcoholic punch. 

That's more than two bottles of fruit of the vine, plus a number of shots and a lot of punch and beer, for every delegate. That seems humanly impossible to modern Americans. But, you see, across the country during the Colonial era, the average American consumed many times as much beverage alcohol as contemporary Americans do. Getting drunk—but not losing control—was simply socially accepted.

Brendan P. Foht: "NEAL MORSE, A ONE MAN ARIAN ROCK BAND"

This article at First Things ties together so many of my obscure interests. This is my new favorite article of all time. As it relates to religion and the American Founding, a lot of the "leading lights" of that era, like Morse believed in Arianism. A taste:

"In a 2007 interview [Neal Morse] stated that he is not a Trinitarian, and that he doesn’t 'see in the Scriptures how Jesus and God can be co-equaI and the same person.'"

Evangelical Universalist on Charles Chauncy

This is from 2009, but still important given how Rev. Charles Chauncy influenced the American Founding. A taste:

Charles Chauncy was minister of First Church in Boston for decades. He was very influential and is best known as an opponent of the Great Awakening (standing against men like Jonathan Edwards, George Whitfield, et al). So that does not make him an obvious person for an evangelical to turn to for inspiration. 

However, Chauncy was a firm Bible-believing Christian and whilst he sadly came to doubt and then reject the classical doctrine of the Trinity we must stress that he did so because he believed it to be unbiblical (it was not uncommon in this period for Bible-based Christians to reject the Trinity as unbiblical). 

Anyway, of interest here is that Chauncy became a universalist because he believed it to be the only view consistent with Scripture. ...

It's true Chauncy did think Scripture taught both theological unitarianism and universalism; but he also thought the natural law discovered by reason taught such as well. And it was in combining reason and revelation that we arrive at such conclusions. (To some who believe Scripture teaches clearly both the doctrines of the Trinity AND eternal damnation, Chauncy's theology represents reason trumping revelation, and therefore is not "Christian," even though Protestant Christianity is an element of such creed.)

Atlantic: "The Origin of 'Liberalism'"

Check it out here. A taste:

My research with Will Fleming finds that the Scottish historian William Robertson appears to be the most significant innovator, repeatedly using “liberal” in a political way, notably in a book published in 1769. (I presented more details in a lecture at the Ratio Institute, viewable here.) Of the Hanseatic League, for example, Robertson spoke of “the spirit and zeal with which they contended for those liberties and rights,” and how a society of merchants, “attentive only to commercial objects, could not fail of diffusing over Europe new and more liberal ideas concerning justice and order.” 

Robertson’s friend and fellow Scot Adam Smith used “liberal” in a similar sense in The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. If all nations, Smith says, were to follow “the liberal system of free exportation and free importation,” then they would be like one great cosmopolitan empire, and famines would be prevented. Then he repeats the phrase: “But very few countries have entirely adopted this liberal system.”

Thomas Percival: Ben Franklin's Kind of "Christian"

Thomas Percival was one of the "dissenters" in Great Britain with whom Ben Franklin palled around. He wasn't quite as well known as Joseph Priestley or Richard Price. But he was a like minded unitarian. And like them, he was quite accomplished!

Anyway, below is a portion of the letter (27 October, 1786) Percival sent to Franklin that illustrates the subcultural zeitgeist in which Franklin was imbibed.

Dr. and Mrs. Priestley have been here this summer, together with Dr. Kippis. Dr. Priestley is not in a very good state of health, having had a return of the complaint with which he was visited several years ago; but his spirits and ardor do not desert him. He is at this time zealously engaged in attempts to convert the Jews to Christianity. For this undertaking he believes himself peculiarly well fitted, as it is a part of his creed, that Jesus Christ was the actual son of Joseph, and a lineal descendant of the house of David. But the Jewish rabbis have declared their resolution to enter into no discussion on these topics, being forbidden, as they allege, by their most sacred laws. 

Dr. Kippis is busied with the Life of Captain Cook, which is to be published separately, as well as in the Biographia Britannica. Our excellent friend, Dr. Price, is, I hear, deeply affected with the death of his wife. A fresh paralytic stroke carried her off about a month since. The Doctor is preparing for the press a volume of Sermons in support of the Arian doctrine, and an enlarged edition of his valuable "Review of the Principal Questions and Difficulties in Morals." The College of Physicians in London have just printed a specimen of a new Pharmacopctia. The President has favored me with a copy; and I think the Dispensatory, on the whole, is likely to be much improved.