Resistance to Tyrants, Obedience to God

Reason, Religion, and Republicanism at the American Founding

Dustin A. Gish, Daniel P. Klinghard

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2013
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780739182208
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Both reason and religion have been acknowledged by scholars to have had a profound impact
on the foundation and formation of the American regime. But the significance, pervasiveness,
and depth of that impact have also been disputed. While many have approached the American
founding period with an interest in the influence of Enlightenment reason or Biblical religion,
they have often assumed such influences to be exclusive, irreconcilable, or contradictory. Few
scholarly works have sought to study the mutual influence of reason and religion as intertwined
strands shaping the American historical and political experience at its founding. The purpose of
the chapters in this volume, authored by a distinguished group of scholars in political science,
intellectual history, literature, and philosophy, is to examine how this mutual influence was
made manifest in the American Founding—especially in the writings, speeches, and thought of
critical figures (Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson,
James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Charles Carroll), and in later works by key interpreters of
the American Founding (Alexis de Tocqueville and Abraham Lincoln).

Taken as a whole, then, this volume does not attempt to explain away the potential opposition
between religion and reason in the American mind of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- centuries, but instead argues that there is a uniquely American perspective and political thought
that emerges from this tension. The chapters gathered here, individually and collectively, seek
to illuminate the animating affect of this tension on the political rhetoric, thought, and history
of the early American period. By taking seriously and exploring the mutual influence of these
two themes in creative tension, rather than seeing them as diametrically opposed or as mutually
exclusive, this volume thus reveals how the pervasiveness and resonance of Biblical narratives
and religion supported and infused Enlightened political discourse and action at the Founding,
thereby articulating the complementarity of reason and religion during this critical period.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• The Mutual Influence of Biblical Religion and Enlightenment Reason at the American Founding
• Reason and Faith
• Faiths of Our Modern Fathers: Bacon’s Progressive Hope and Locke’s Liberal Christianity
• The Radical Enlightenment’s Critique of the American Revolution
• “Nature’s God” as Deus sive Natura : Spinoza, Jefferson, and the Historical Transmission of the Theological-Political Question
• Biblical Rhetoric and Republicanism
• Benjamin Franklin, Virtue’s Ethics, and “Political Truth”
• Evil Counselors, Corrupt Traitors, and Bad Kings: The Hebrew Bible and Political Critique in Revolutionary America and Beyond
• Religion, Reason, and Republicanism in Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia
• Religion and Politics
• Charles Carroll, the American Revolution, and Catholic Identity: Constitutional Discourses in Revolutionary Maryland
• The Founding Founders’ Disagreements about Church and State
• Alexander Hamilton, Religion, and American Conservatism
• Legacies
• In the Valley of the Dry Bones: Abraham Lincoln’s Biblical Oratory and the Coming of the Civil War
• Enlightenment Philosophy, Biblical Religion, and Tocqueville’s New Science of Politics
• Index
• Contributors