Did America Have a Christian Founding?

Separating Modern Myth from Historical Truth

Mark David Hall

• Publisher: Thomas Nelson
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781400211111
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Primordi della storia americana

A distinguished professor debunks the assertion that America's Founders were deists who desired the strict separation of church and state and instead shows that their political ideas were profoundly influenced by their Christian convictions.

In 2010, David Mark Hall gave a lecture at the Heritage Foundation entitled "Did America Have a Christian Founding?" His balanced and thoughtful approach to this controversial question caused a sensation. C-SPAN televised his talk, and an essay based on it has been downloaded more than 300, 000 times.

In this book, Hall expands upon this essay, making the airtight case that America's Founders were not deists. He explains why and how the Founders' views are absolutely relevant today, showing

• that they did not create a "godless" Constitution;
• that even Jefferson and Madison did not want a high wall separating church and state;
• that most Founders believed the government should encourage Christianity; and
• that they embraced a robust understanding of religious liberty for biblical and theological reasons.

This compelling and utterly persuasive book will convince skeptics and equip believers and conservatives to defend the idea that Christian thought was crucial to the nation's founding--and that this benefits all of us, whatever our faith (or lack of faith).

CHAPTER 1

THE MYTH OF THE FOUNDERS’ DEISM¹

The Founding Fathers were at most deists—they believed God created the world, then left it alone to run.

GORDON WOOD, AMERICAN HERITAGE MAGAZINE

The founding fathers themselves, largely deists in their orientation and sympathy.

EDWIN GAUSTAD, A DOCUMENTARY HISTORY OF RELIGION IN AMERICA

The Founding Fathers were . . . skeptical men of the Enlightenment who questioned each and every received idea they had been taught.

BROOKE ALLEN, MORAL MINORITY

The God of the founding fathers was a benevolent deity, not far removed from the God of eighteenth-century Deists or nineteenth-century Unitarians. . . . They were not, in any traditional sense, Christian.

MARK A. NOLL, NATHAN O. HATCH, AND GEORGE M. MARSDEN, THE SEARCH FOR CHRISTIAN AMERICA

America’s Founders were philosophical radicals.

MATTHEW STEWART, NATURE’S GOD: THE HERETICAL ORIGINS OF THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC²

Scholars and popular authors regularly assert that America’s founders were deists. They support these claims by describing the religious views of the following men: Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Thomas Paine, Alexander Hamilton, and Ethan Allen. On rare occasion, they reach beyond this select fraternity to include another founder, and they almost inevitably concede that not all founders were as enlightened as the ones they profile. However, they leave the distinct impression that most founders, and certainly the important ones, were deists.

In the eighteenth century, deism referred to an intellectual movement that emphasized the role of reason in discerning religious truth. Deists rejected traditional Christian doctrine such as the incarnation, virgin birth, atonement, resurrection, Trinity, divine inspiration of the Holy Scriptures, and miracles. For present purposes, this last point is critical; unlike most Christians, deists did not think God intervenes in the affairs of men and nations. In Alan Wolfe’s words, they believed that “God set the world in motion and then abstained from human affairs.”³ In this chapter, I demonstrate that there is virtually no evidence that America’s founders embraced such views.

CIVIC LEADERS WHO PUBLICLY EMBRACED DEISM

Given the numerous powerful and clear claims that the founders were deists, it is striking that there are few instances of civic leaders in the era openly embracing deism or rejecting orthodox Christian doctrines.⁴ In 1725, during his first English sojourn, Benjamin Franklin published an essay entitled “A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain,” in which he concluded that “Vice and Virtue were empty Distinctions.”⁵ Deists emphasized the importance of morality, so the essay is not evidence of deism. But assuming Franklin was serious (often a dangerous assumption), the work is an example of a founder publicly rejecting a basic tenet of orthodox Christianity. Yet it is noteworthy that even as a young man, Franklin rapidly concluded that the essay “might have an ill Tendency,” and he destroyed most copies of it before they could be distributed.⁶

In his autobiography, begun in 1771 and not published until after his death, Franklin acknowledged that he fell under the influence of deism as a young man. He noted his regret that his religious arguments “perverted” some of his friends. In his later years, Franklin may have moved toward more traditional religious views.⁷ In the Constitutional Convention of 1787, he reflected that “the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth—that God governs the affairs of men”⁸ (emphasis original). Three years later, he wrote a letter to Yale president Ezra Stiles in which he affirmed many traditional Christian doctrines, but admitted he had “some doubts” about the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth.⁹ As with many founders, Franklin’s religious beliefs changed throughout his life. It seems reasonable, however, to classify him as a founder who both publicly and privately rejected or questioned some tenets of orthodox Christianity.

Ethan Allen, leader of the Green Mountain Boys, hero of Fort Ticonderoga, and advocate of statehood for Vermont, published the first American book advocating deism in 1784, Reason: The Only Oracle of Man. It sold fewer than two hundred copies, and after its publication, Allen played no role in American politics. Even modern authors sympathetic to Allen’s views recognize that he was a “disorganized and stylistically clumsy writer,” and that the book never achieved great influence.¹⁰

A decade later, Thomas Paine published his famous defense of deism, The Age of Reason. Paine was born and raised in England, and lived only twenty of his seventy-two years in America, so one can reasonably ask if he should be counted as an American founder. The book was written and first published in Europe. Although it sold reasonably well in the United States, America’s civic leaders’ reactions to it were almost uniformly negative.¹¹ Samuel Adams wrote his old ally a personal letter denouncing it, and John Adams, John Witherspoon, William Paterson, and John Jay each criticized the book.¹² Benjamin Rush called it “absurd and impious,” Charles Carroll condemned Paine’s “blasphemous writings against the Christian religion,” and Connecticut jurist Zephaniah Swift wrote that we “cannot sufficiently reprobate the beliefs of Thomas Paine in his attack on Christianity.”¹³ Elias Boudinot and Patrick Henry went so far as to write book-length rebuttals of it.¹⁴ When Paine returned to America, he was vilified because of the book. Indeed, with the exception of Jefferson and a few others, he was abandoned by all of his old friends. When he passed away in 1809, he had to be buried on a farm because even the tolerant Quakers refused to let him be interred in their church cemetery; only six mourners came to his funeral.¹⁵

Some founders may have secretly approved of The Age of Reason but criticized it for political reasons. Yet the overwhelmingly negative reaction to the work says a great deal about American religious and political culture in the late eighteenth century. Whatever attraction deism may have had for a select few, clearly the American public was not ready to embrace such teachings or political leaders who advocated heterodox ideas. With the exception of Franklin, Allen, and Paine, I am unaware of any civic leaders in the era who clearly and publicly rejected orthodox Christianity or embraced deism. There may be others, but those who claim the founders were deists give little or no evidence that they exist.

CIVIC LEADERS WHO PRIVATELY EMBRACED DEISM

Thomas Jefferson definitely rejected orthodox Christianity, but he went to great lengths to keep his religious views far from the public. Virtually all the texts that reveal his true beliefs were letters written to family members or close friends, and he often asked that they be kept private; in some cases, they were never sent, presumably because he was not sure the recipients could be trusted. An excellent example is an 1819 missive from Jefferson to William Short, where he rejected doctrines “invented by ultra-Christian sects” such as “the immaculate conception of Jesus, His deification, the creation of the world by Him, His miraculous powers, His resurrection and visible ascension, His corporeal presence in the Eucharist, the Trinity, original sin, atonement, regeneration, election, orders of Hierarchy, etc.”¹⁶

Jefferson was a skeptic, but he realized that publicly advocating his religious views would be political suicide. Indeed, relatively minor lapses from his rule of secrecy, such as when he wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia (1784) that “it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg,” came close to costing him the election of 1800.¹⁷

John Adams was a lifelong Congregationalist who believed it appropriate for the state to support and encourage Christianity. He respected the Bible’s moral teachings, as indicated by an 1816 letter where he wrote, “The Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount contain my Religion.”¹⁸ Yet, in an 1813 letter to his son, he made it clear that he rejected the divinity of Christ: “An incarnate God!!! An eternal, self-existent, omnipresent omniscient Author of this stupendous Universe suffering on a Cross!!! My Soul starts with horror, at the Idea.”¹⁹ Like Jefferson, Adams kept his religious views extremely private. Indeed, the public’s perception that he was a Calvinist who would impose a national church on the American people contributed to his losing the election of 1800.²⁰ But he nevertheless must be numbered among those founders who privately rejected Christian orthodoxy.

THE OTHER USUAL SUSPECTS

Three other founders are regularly referred to as deists: Washington, Madison, and Hamilton. Yet, to my knowledge, no writer has ever produced a public or private journal entry, letter, or essay showing that these men rejected Christianity or embraced deism. The argument that they did so is based almost entirely on negative evidence, resting on some combination of observations that they seldom used familiar biblical appellations for God or Jesus Christ, did not regularly attend church, chose not to become communicants, and/or did not always act in a moral manner.

In the case of George Washington, for instance, authors such as David Holmes argue that Washington referred to God with “Deistic terms [such] as ‘Providence,’ ‘Heaven,’ ‘the Deity,’ ‘the Supreme Being,’ ‘the Grand Architect,’ ‘the Author of all Good,’ and ‘the Great Ruler of Events.’”²¹ Yet, as I show below, indisputably orthodox Christians regularly used such appellations. On the surface, Washington’s refusal to take communion suggests that he was not a serious Christian; however, as John Fea points out, this “was not uncommon among eighteenth-century Anglicans,” and Washington may have done so because he “did not believe he was worthy to participate in the sacrament.”²²

Writing about Washington’s religious beliefs is a virtual cottage industry, so I cannot assess and engage every argument about his faith here. Yet it is worth reemphasizing that none of the authors who claim Washington was a deist has cited a text where he rejected a basic tenet of orthodox Christianity. I have scoured Washington’s works and have found one possibility, but I believe it should be treated with care. On March 31, 1791, Jefferson drafted and Washington signed a condolence letter to the emperor of Morocco that includes the sentence: “May that God, whom we both adore, bless your Imperial Majesty with long life, Health and Success, and have you always, great and magnanimous Friend, under his holy keeping.”²³ Conflating the God of Christianity and the God of Islam is problematic from a traditional Christian perspective, yet given the diplomatic context, it seems imprudent to read too much into this missive.

Washington is sometimes accused of having an extramarital affair, and there is no doubt that Alexander Hamilton did so.²⁴ Some writers cite such actions as evidence that particular founders were not seri...