Where do we begin? How we approach politics from a Christian perspective today largely depends on how people approached politics in the past. What prerogative do we have, historically speaking, to pursue a politically Christian agenda? Would we be merely reasserting the Christian faith of our forefathers or would we be attempting to read into the Founding Fathers’ motives?
In our day we have largely lost the desire to take any author’s original intent into mind when reading a text. We bring our own experiences into the text and, from the foundation of ourselves, we explore the text in our own light. What the author wanted to say was relevant only to him or her self, and what my friend “gets out of it” may be totally different than what I do. During the Enlightenment this was most certainly not an acceptable means of interpreting a given text. People, by and large, still believed in an objective truth; that is a truth which exists regardless of what anyone believes. Therefore we should not read our own methods of interpretation into the past to discern what the religious intentions of the Founding Fathers were.
We are all influenced by the common ideas of our time, and the people who propose them. Some of the foundational people for the Enlightenment were John Locke, Francis Bacon, and Isaac Newton. Bacon asserted that the foundation of human knowledge was observation and experience and not abstract principles. What we know should be based on what we observe through our senses and what we ourselves experience, rather than on mere ideological frameworks. Newton then applied the same reasoning to the sciences which has helped to establish the foundation of the scientific method that we have today which is based upon repeatable and observable phenomena.
Locke took this reasoning with him into the realm of philosophy and, by extension, theology. According to Locke, human experience and rationality were superior to religious dogma and were what should be used to determine the validity of any belief. Therefore if we find certain Biblical assertions to be irrational then they must be wrong. What Locke does is help to usher in a fundamental shift in religious authority. We must no longer bring our minds in line with the authority of the Bible (and the traditions of the Church for Roman Catholics) but rather the Bible must fall in line with our ability to reason.
Given the sudden and, for the times, explosive discoveries and assertions of the scientific and mathematic communities people began to focus on the rationality, reason and logic of God. God, if He existed, had created a profoundly ordered cosmos. These discoveries captured the minds and imagination of many and seemed to speak volumes about God; so much so that the Christian religious tradition was sometimes rejected in favor of the purely reason-centered, rationalistic approach to religion. This is, quite simply, Deism. A rational but distant Deity whose existence is testified to by nature but who is not all that involved with the lives of Its creation.
Not all Deists rejected the authority of the Bible or of the Church. As a whole the movement lacked any sort of structure and was a collection of people who asserted the supremacy of human reason over and above anything else and who therefore assumed that God must be purely rational and reasonable just like them. Some, like Thomas Paine, attacked Christianity as a barrier to moral improvement and social justice. Others attempted to reconcile belief in such a supremely rational Deity with the salvation offered by Jesus Christ, the importance of prayer and regular church attendance. Regardless of their own person taste for orthodoxy, all Deists thought that the “rational, mechanistic harmony of nature revealed a deity,” and some even attributed the characteristics of love and divinity to nature itself. Thus, at its core, Deism was a movement that saw mechanical brilliance and genius in the orderliness of the natural world and believed that these things testified to God’s existence or bespoke nature’s own divine nature.
There are similar sentiments in the Bible. The very beginning of the Bible, the first chapter of Genesis, relates that it was God who formed all that exists. Furthermore the Psalmist declares that “the heavens declare the glory of God and the skies show his handiwork.” Saint Paul relates to the Roman Church that God’s anger is upon those who deliberately deny the truth concerning Him because the world itself speaks to His existence and therefore they are without excuse. Christians and Deists can agree that the nature of the world speaks to the existence of a divine agent. However, while Enlightenment Deists spoke to the flawlessness of nature the Bible also speaks to its fallen nature: “We know that the whole of creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.” The natural world speaks to us about God’s existence, but the natural world is itself subject to imperfection. We have seen much of nature’s imperfection in the recent tsunamis, hurricanes and earthquakes that have claimed countless lives in the new millennium.
Enlightenment Deism was neither atheistic nor was it Christian. It repeatedly questioned those Christian teachings which seemed unreasonable, such as Christ’s sacrificial death. No rational God would suspend the laws of nature to work such irrational things as “miracles.” Deism undermined Christianity and Judaism by denying the supernatural core of these religions and supplanted its own five key foundational truths, as documented by Edward Herbert:
1) There is a God
2) God ought to be worshipped
3) Virtue is the principal element in worship
4) People should repent of their sins
5) There is life after death where evil is punished and good is rewarded
While there were Enlightenment philosophers who could defend these assertions, they strike me as being simply taken from the Bible and read into nature with some slight modification particularly with the third point. As simplistic as it sounds, worship is the principal element of worship and not virtue. The pattern of the Ten Commandments reveals that first and foremost one must worship God and then, out of the worship, comes virtuous action that is pleasing to God. First and foremost, the Israelites were called to worship the “Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me.” There is a similar warping of Christian doctrine concerning the fifth fundamental point of Deism. Whereas the Deists focused on social action, the primary focus of Christianity is worship and is the ultimate basis upon which people shall be judged. As the ascended Jesus revealed to the church of Smyrna through John, “’Be faithful, even to the point of death, and I will give you the crown of life.’”
The Deists, who claimed to have come to these conclusions via their reason and by observing nature, seem to have been heavily influenced by the momentum of Christian truth while undercutting its authority. I am not sure how the natural world of earthquakes and predators speaks to the need of people to be virtuous, to repent of their sins, or most significantly that there is life after death. Neither is the author of Ecclesiastes who writes: “’Who knows if the spirit of man rises upward and if the spirit of the animal goes down into the earth? So I saw that there is nothing better for a man than to enjoy his work, because that is his lost. For who can bring him to see what will happen after him?’” By looking at the world in and of itself, how can one see if anyone rises or descends to anywhere after the grave? The Deists may have supposed that it was their reason which led them to such conclusions, but it seems somewhat suspicious that they are trying to assert what the Judeo-Christian traditions asserted merely without the religious baggage. If anything, Darwin showed us that the natural world is one where the strongest would survive. Tennyson echoed this sentiment with his “nature red in tooth and claw.”
Regardless, the third and fifth Deist points reflect their high regard for social justice. Such echoes are found in the Declaration of Independence’s first and second paragraphs, which go to length to assert the rights of those who are subject to social injustice. This is not to say that the Church was not interested in social justice, rather that social justice was the war cry of the Deists of the time. Furthermore, while the Declaration of Independence includes references to God, those references are couched in Deistic, distant language of Deity such as “Nature’s God” and “the Supreme Judge of the world.
Deism began a clear decline in 1809 in the wake of Thomas Paine’s death as well as its failure to speak to people’s needs for emotional guidance, spiritual guidance, worship and a community of faith. It remained somewhat popular among the institutions of higher learning however, and Holmes notes that it would be “surprising if Deism had not influenced the founding fathers because most were young men when the movement started.” That we see Deistic language used in the Declaration of Independence itself is a strong sign that the founding fathers were at least familiar with the movement. Their personal writings, however, can shed further light on their individual beliefs.
There is little controversy regarding the religious convictions, if any, of three notable founding fathers; namely Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Franklin thought that all religions were, in fact, the same; Adams was a Unitarian which, in many ways, is a form of Christian Deism, and Thomas Jefferson is said to have “epitomized what it means in America to be a man of the Enlightenment.” Furthermore, he wrote his own version of the Bible with all of the miracles removed; such an act is very indicative of his Deistic views.
The views of George Washington and James Monroe are highly controversial. For Washington’s part, he maintained a strict Sabbath, but he never received communion following the Revolutionary War and his church attendance was considered rather inconsistent. The latter may be explained by the poor quality of roads and inclement weather keeping him from making it to church. He was, however, far more concerned with ethics and morality than theology and while this may seem to draw him closer to the Deist camp, there are many Christians throughout history who have had little to no interest in theology but have maintained a Biblical faith. What is most interesting is that even shortly after his death, people were trying to claim George Washington as a hero of their religion. Which speaks to how important it was even in Washington’s day for the nation to be perceived as having strong Christian roots. This occurrence raises a troubling question for us Christians: are the pews so devoid of real saints that we must edit them into our history and into our creeds? We do not need Christian heroes because we have Christ, but what we do need is Christians of integrity.
Monroe’s views are even more difficult to know. In public he readily acknowledged “Almighty God” and a “Creator.” Bishop Meade, who knew the Virginian founding fathers and their families well, mentions Monroe five times in his writings but says nothing concerning his religious faith; this is in sharp contrast to his detailed accounts of Madison’s and Jefferson’s views, the latter of which he dismisses as an unbeliever. What we do know is that Madison was a Freemason, and his association with them could have readily influenced his religious views.
At the same time, concerning the first five presidents and, collectively, ten wives and female children among all of them, seven were orthodox Christians. It has often been said that behind every strong man there stands a good woman. However, to assert the fundamental Christian identity of our nation based merely on the faith of these seven women is too much of a stretch to reasonably make. What we can safely say is that the founding fathers were familiar with Christianity but, like most people of all times, were heavily influenced by the popular views of their day and the women in their families. Given that Deism has Christian roots, those who were not Deists themselves, or Unitarians such as Adams, probably believed in some combination of Christianity and Deism. To what extent that leaves for any of them to be genuine Christians is, of course, a matter of debate. What we can safely say is that Christianity had a strong influence upon the nation, but probably more so amongst the common people than the founding fathers themselves.
