Bad Article Misunderstands Founding Principles
Jonathan Rowe on Sep 4th 2006
But what else would you expect from WorldnutDaily? The culprit is Tom Flannery. Let’s take this line by line.
At the end of the 18th century, Founding Fathers like John Adams and Alexander Hamilton were becoming increasingly troubled by the revolution that was unfolding in France.
Unlike the American Revolution, which was founded on the Christian principles delineated in the Declaration of Independence, the French version was virulently anti-religious (particularly in regard to Christianity). The revolutionaries sought to replace religion with human reason, even going so far as suggesting that Notre Dame be renamed the “Cathedral of Reason.”
First, it’s ironic that Flannery begins by citing John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, both of whom were theistic rationalists (Hamilton converted to orthodox Christianity only towards the end of his life, after he did his work founding the nation); that is they elevated man’s reason over revelation as the ultimate arbiter of Truth.
Next, he claims that “Christian principles delineated…the Declaration of Independence.” Funny, I don’t see one citation to Scripture or reference to God in Biblical terms at all in America’s Declaration. And Flannery draws a faux distinction between the ideology of the American and French Revolutions (indeed, I wrote this post exposing the way Christian Nationalists often make this error). It’s true that the French Revolution became hostile to religion in a way that the American never did (and keep in mind, they had a national Church to disestablish — one that was very illiberal at the time, the RCC — and we didn’t). But both revolutions, in their founding documents, make parallel ideological assertions. This shouldn’t surprise given that Thomas Jefferson, the author of America’s Declaration, was in France helping to spur on their Revolution and assisted in writing their Founding document, the French’s Declaration of the Rights of Man.
Perhaps he should read both documents and see for himself. If “Christian principles” delineate the Declaration of Independence, they likewise delineate the French’s Declaration of the Rights of Man. That document was done “under the auspices of the Supreme Being,” and actually refers to property as “an inviolable and sacred right.” That’s about as “Christian” language as you will find in America’s DOI.
Back to the article:
Well, don’t look now, but a move is afoot by leftists in media and government today — having learned nothing from the horrors of the French Revolution or the Soviet experiment or other such examples throughout history — to once again enshrine human reason, with the twin engine of scientific discovery, as man’s guiding light. They hope that by doing so they can do away once and for all with what they view as the “superstition” of religion.
Again, I note with further irony that our Founding Fathers, like Adams and Hamilton, were rationalists who believed man’s reason and scientific discovery were indeed man’s guiding light. Here is John Adams’s in his own words on the matter:
“The United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature; and if men are now sufficiently enlightened to disabuse themselves of artifice, imposture, hypocrisy, and superstition, they will consider this event as an era in their history. Although the detail of the formation of the American governments is at present little known or regarded either in Europe or in America, it may hereafter become an object of curiosity. It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the influence of Heaven, more than those at work upon ships or houses, or laboring in merchandise or agriculture; it will forever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses.
“. . . Thirteen governments [of the original states] thus founded on the natural authority of the people alone, without a pretence of miracle or mystery, and which are destined to spread over the northern part of that whole quarter of the globe, are a great point gained in favor of the rights of mankind.”
John Adams, A Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, 1788
Likewise Adams and company, in 1797, ratified a treaty (making it part of “the law of the land”) which explicitly stated, “the Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.”
And while our Founders supported religion generally and had no desire to “do away with it,” they did believe man’s reason superseded Biblical revelation, and they disdained much of what they regarded as “superstition” coming from orthodox Christianity — doctrines like the Trinity, the Incarnation, the atonement, eternal damnation, and others. See this post for John Adams’s quotations on those matters.
Finally, one last error to point out in Flannery’s article:
The experimental method known as science, you see, was founded by Christians who wanted to explore the universe for the glory of God and the benefit of mankind. But when you remove God from that equation, then man is the final arbiter of what is good and what is bad, what is morally acceptable and what is not. The result of this is the embrace of godless concepts like evolution and communism….
Ah no, Aristotle, of Pagan Ancient Greece, “founded” the “experimental method known as science.” Christians learned science from the West’s Pagan Greco-Roman heritage.
When will they ever learn?
Filed in The Belfry, The Biosphere, The Bureau
Jon,
Your scholaship on this matter is indispensable. Have you written a book or two? Do you have your essays on a CD?
I wholeheartedly agree with your comments on the stance of people like Jefferson and Adams v.a.v. religion and the Church of Rome (Christianity) in particular. As much as I can remember, Jefferson had always been extremely critical of Christianity. Secondly, I consider Jefferson’s victory in the Presidential elections that brought him to the US presidency as yet another victory in US history of rational, common sense against the revivalist authoritarianism (of Hamilton c.s.) that had much in common with the European ancien regime’s loyalty to rigid catholicism.
Thanks. No book yet. I have an article coming out in a print pub which I’ll let you know when once it’s published.
I recorded and uploaded to YouTube a webcast on George Washington’s religion. More of those to come.
Thank you for your commentary on this subject. Reading what the American founders and other Enlightenment thinkers actually had to say about things can be quite an eye-opener. It certainly was for me when I began to read what they had to say for themselves. I find it astonishing that anyone with a modicum of sense, and any degree of awareness of world events, would think that what is needed today is less reason. At a time when religious zealots are willing - eager - to kill, die, and use any means to promote their agenda in the name of their god, it is not less reason, but more that is needed.
I’m curious if you agree with the following way of putting things. Jefferson and some of the other founders were seriously opposed to Christianity in its standard forms, but there were still ways that their views were influenced by Christianity that the French constitution was resisting. I think that’s all that’s really necessary to make the original point. I agree that the rhetoric is overblown to the point of inaccuracy, but I think it can go the other direction in ways that go beyond the actual views of Jefferson, who did believe in a deity and did believe rights to be derived from the creator rather than some naturalistic system of ethics. Isn’t the French version of Enlightenment thought more naturalistic than that?
Another issue is the percentage of founders who were deists like Adams and Jefferson. The most vocal and influential founders were deists. There’s no question about that. But isn’t it still true that most of the founders who were present at the founding meetings were orthodox Christians who believed in special revelation (and thus were not deists) and the particularly Christian doctrines of the Bible that deists like Jefferson rejected?
Jeremy Pierce, Rowe has already addressed Jefferson, deism, and unitarianism in some earlier posts.
John Adams was a unitarian theologically and by church membership. He joined a Christian unitarian church and later wrote to Jefferson about their mutual disbelief in the illogical doctrine of the Trinity. Adams’ views developed along the lines of the modern Unitarian Universalist synthesis. He considered the teachings of Jesus superior to and less corrupted than other religious systems, but he also indicates God inspired religions in general towards a doctrine of loving others. His letters on Hinduism provide some worthwhile reading in this area. Adams also believed in eventual universal salvation.
Adams, and probably Jefferson, would not stand against divine revelation but rather emphasize reason over claims of revelation. The Trinity is wrong because the doctrine is unreasonable; the command to love others is correct because that doctrine is sensible. A strict deist would argue the book of nature is the entirety of God’s revelation and prayers are ineffective, which is not the view one takes from Adams’ writings. Adams held the book of nature and human reason are above claims of revelation, but he did not totally dismiss God’s interjection into human events.
Those misunderstandings aside, I will have to leave the meat of your questions to those more familiar with that particular area. Many attendees of the constitutional convention and various other “founding” events were probably more traditional in their belief systems than Jefferson and Adams, but determining what people fell where on a spectrum of religious orthodoxy would be a massive project and may be infeasible given our sources.
Jeremy,
IE brings up a good point (and my past post) on the “Deism” issue. Under a broader definition of Deism — one who looks primarily to reason over revelation, one who dismisses as “irrational” many orthodox Christian doctrines like the Trinity — Jefferson, Franklin, and Adams all qualify as varieties of “Deists.”
The problem is many folks have come to equate Deism with its “strict” definition of believing in a remote, non-intervening Watchmaker God. And Jefferson and Franklin — like Adams, Madison, and Washington — believed in a warm intervening Providence. So whether we should be calling any of the important Founders, other than Paine and Allen, “Deists” is a matter of contention. “Deistic” perhaps. Strict “Deists” no.
Regarding the orthodox Christians. I’m not sure how many of them there were. Certainly, there were many, perhaps a majority of the “Founding Fathers.” The key Founders though — Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Madison, Washington, G. Morris, Wilson, Hamilton (before his end of life conversion) were not orthodox Christians but followed a more Enlightenment influenced creed, which has been given lots of names, “Deist,” “Unitarian,” “Christian-Deist,” “warm-Deist.” None of them were strict Deists in the way Thomas Paine and Ethan Allen were. All likely rejected the Trinity and other key doctrines of orthodox Christianity though. Dr. Gregg Frazer, whose work I endorse, has coined the term “Theistic Rationalist,” which I think is a good descriptor.
The Declaration and the Constitution were, in many ways, consensus documents, which drew principles upon which both sides — the enlightenment rationalists and orthodox Christians — could agree.
Re: The French Revolution and naturalism. I see the same general theistic premises in their founding documents as in ours. The major differences between the two Revolutions were not so much “in principle” but “in practice” (though Rousseau was probably more influential in theirs as Locke was in ours). They had an illiberal Church to disestablish and a monarchy to unseat. And they became very hostile to religion in a way that ours never did.
But even Rousseau’s notion of a “civil religion” seems indentical to our public founding theology, where a generically defined God, whose care we are under, grants us rights and ultimately rewards good and punishes evil.
Deists are those who reject special revelation or have epistemic doubts about whether we could trust it. The providence issue doesn’t seem to be the focus of deism, and if wikipedia is any indication, then it’s a matter of controversy whether deists need to accept any particular view at all on providence to count as deists. So it strikes me as strange to hear you call that issue the strict definition when it’s not clear to me that it’s part of the definition at all.
I was reading Ben Witherington’s summation of David Holmes’s work, and he lists John Jay and Samuel Adams as pretty orthodox Christians. He also says most of the wives of the less orthodox were probably much more orthodox than their husbands, which I hadn’t considered but makes sense.
Interestingly, one of the commenters on the Witherington thread says that Jefferson was persuaded by others to put in the language about rights from God. I had not heard that before. Witherington responds that Supreme Judge language was common among deists, however, which means even most deists saw something of a moral interest in God (which puts to rest the notion that deism is about whether God cares about what happens, at least if Witherington is right on this).
On the original issue of whether Christianity has influenced some of the broader western societal themes (I know you were focusing on science), have you read Stark’s stuff on that? He seems to think some of what was important for the success of Western civilization was a distinct contribution from Christianity, and it isn’t all based on science (and what is science in it is some very specific things that don’t all come from Aristotle).
Jeremy,
Holmes’s book is great and I’ve blogged about it before. I’ve had a number of people suggest Stark’s work, but I’ve never read it. I have a hard time with the premise though. Major scientific breakthroughs coincide with the Enlightenment. Christianity persisted for some thousand and several hundred years where standards of living and technology remained fairly constant. The issue is a tough one given that Western Culture itself has a secular pagan (Greco-Roman) as well as religious (Judeo-Christian) roots. And these systems are not easily separable from one another (it’s like pouring black and white paint in a bowl — not fully mixing them so you can see parts that are pure black, parts that are pure white, with infinite shades of gray — and then try to fully separate the black and white paint). The roots have grown together and, although there are grave irreconcilabilities between the two, much of Western Culture is simply a synthesis of these two cultural traditions.
Isaac Netwton is a great example. He’s one of the Enlightenment’s earliest innovators. He was also quite religious. I’ve seen both sides “claim” his greatness. Given his religiousity, he wasn’t secular. But given that he was a Unitarian freethinker, I don’t think we can give “Christianity” the credit for his accomplishments, as he arguably wasn’t a “Christian.”
“Deists are those who reject special revelation or have epistemic doubts about whether we could trust it. The providence issue doesn’t seem to be the focus of deism….”
As I said before, under a broader understanding of “Deism” we could categorize Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Washington, and Franklin there. But I’ve read enough of these debates to know that opponents will use the “Deists believe in a remote non-intervening God” line against the notion. Certainly this is what Michael Novak does in his book to “prove” Washington wasn’t a Deist.
Also, as Gregg Frazer argues in his Ph.D. thesis, it’s likely that each of those five Founders did believe in *some* revelation. But they also rejected some revelation (that is they thought the Bible was errant). And they used Reason as the filter for determining what Revelation in the Bible was legitimately given by God.
The religion of Newton and the subsequent debates over the feasibility of the Christian God or, indeed, any God existing in his system is quite an interesting story itself. If Socrates was the Helen of the classical age whose teachings launched a thousand philosophical ships to claim him, that designation surely belongs to Newton in the modern world. The philosophical war he ignited IS the Enlightenment - and the modern world is the result.