The Novaks on Ellis on the Founders
Jonathan Rowe on Feb 27th 2007
Michael and Jana Novak have responded to Joseph Ellis’ thoughts on the Founders and Religion on the Encyclopedia Britannica Blog. (See my thoughts on Ellis’ post.) In particular, they don’t like Ellis’ use of the phrase, “pantheistic sense of providential destiny,” to describe Washington’s God. They write:
Finally, it is really not possible to demonstrate from Washington’s public decrees that the Providence to whom he asked his army and fellow citizens to pray was “pantheistic.” On the contrary, his public prayers as commanding General and as President expected Providence to favor liberty and thus, though both prayed to the same Providence, the American cause over the British. He expected his God — and the nation — to “interpose” his divine action in the course of the war, and in the later course of American history.
And just as the American Founders held that the natural rights they declared belonged not solely to them but to all humankind, so the God to whom they prayed did not belong solely to them, but is the Almighty Lord of all, who sits in judgment over this nation and others. President Washington did not scruple, in his eloquent message to the Hebrew Congregation of Savannah, to identify the God “Jehovah” who led the Jewish people in Israel, with the Providence who led Americans through their founding period.
I think “pantheistic” aptly describes not just Washington’s, but the other key Founders’ God. Though It was, as the Novaks’ note, a particular type of pantheistic Providence; theirs was an active personal God, indeed one who favored political liberty and frowned upon tyrannical leaders (not exactly attributes of the Biblical God, who doesn’t seem concerned with political — as opposed to spiritual — liberty; and Paul admonishes Christians to follow civil magistrates, even secular, pagan, and arguably tyrannical ones like Nero, the leader to whom Paul told Christians to obey in Romans 13).
The Founders’ God was, however, universalistic. Various peoples of various religious traditions, even those outside the “Judeo-Christian” one, worshipped the same God who goes by many different proper names. And it was customary for the Founders to use the proper name for God with which the addressees would feel most comfortable. The only time Washington ever, to my knowledge, named God “Jehovah” was in one address to the Hebrew Congregation of Savannah. Twice however, I have counted Washington used the proper name “the Great Spirit” — here and here — for God, but only when addressing American Indians.
In sum, if “pantheistic” can mean an active, personal, universalistic God, then such a term accurately describes the God the key Founders like Washington worshipped.
Filed in The Belfry, The Bureau
Isn’t the term “pantheism” typically used to denote the belief that all things in the universe are simply manefestations of God? That is, that there is no distinction between the physical realm and the being of God? Under this definition, it would be hard to categorize the Founders as pantheists.
That may be one understanding of the term and if that is the case, then you are right. I’m wondering if “pantheism” could include such concepts of universalism.
I think your dichotomy of Founders’ God vs Biblical God is incorrect Jon, especially in terms of your understanding of Christian theology, but you won’t seem to let it go, despite some good evidence to the contrary, whether it be Novak’s ‘03 article, which also touches on pantheism, or the more direct work of Jacques Maritain. There is not a disconnect between Christianity and Liberty, as much as atheist libertarians would like there to be.
Merriam-Webster lists two definitions for panthism.
1 : a doctrine that equates God with the forces and laws of the universe
2 : the worship of all gods of different creeds, cults, or peoples indifferently; also : toleration of worship of all gods (as at certain periods of the Roman empire)
It seems to me that the second condition of definition two would include the founders as pantheistic. They did promote the free exercise of religion and for that to work there has to be a modicum of tolerance.
We should not forget that sometimes this tolerance has been mandated by the courts. in the 1930s and 40s the Jehovah’s Witnesses used the courts several times to end discriminatory practices being enforced against them.
As to whether pantheism could embrace univeralism, I think some would argue for and others against. Again going to MW the primary definition given is:
“1 often capitalized a : a theological doctrine that all human beings will eventually be saved b : the principles and practices of a liberal Christian denomination founded in the 18th century originally to uphold belief in universal salvation and now united with Unitarianism”
That seems to be pretty inclusive while leaving a lot of bickering room.
Scof,
I am not trying to argue that the God of the Founding documents WASN’T the Biblical God, rather that He wasn’t necessarily the Biblical God. Though if you look at the personal beliefs of the key Founders, their God arguably wasn’t the Biblical God because He was unitarian, not Trinitarian in His attributes, and they rejected certain attributes of His recorded in Scripture — like His jealousy and wrath — because they viewed such as irrational.
But when they invoked God in their public supplications, they weren’t trying to exclude anyone. Indeed, they were so inclusivist that their creed was universalistic. Their vision of God included the “Judeo-Christian” God, but also Allah, the Great Spirit of the American Indians, the different manifestations of the Hindu Gods and and the Pagan Providence of the Greco-Romans.
The problem, though, is that Christianity/the Biblical God makes exclusivist claims as to Whom He is and that exclusivism is something about God these Founders did not believe in their personal creed, nor did they include this attribute in their public supplications to Him or when they appealed to Him in Founding documents like the Declaration.
At best for those who want to believe the Christian (or “Judeo-Christian”) God and the God of America’s Founding are one and the same, we could say the Founders defined God’s attributes to a particular level of generality, and then left the individual citizen to fill in the “gaps.” In other words, the Declaration could be your Trinitarian Biblical God, or their benevolent unitarian God or some impersonal deistic God or the Wiccan’s God of Nature, or Allah, or Howard Dean’s liberal Christian God who created gays qua gays and so on and so forth.
Similarly, with a God who favors liberty and frowns upon political tyranny. I am not saying this is inconsistent with the Biblical God’s attributes. Simply that these are “a-biblical” (not “anti-Biblical”) ideas about God. If you want to believe this about God, you have to go to some other source, not the Bible, for these attributes, and then go back and reinterpret your Bible through this lens.
My understanding of pantheism (such as Spinoza’s) is that the divine is immanent and all-pervasive. Most theistic and deistic beliefs are transcendent with a divine Being the locus. What made Trinitarian Christianity so “absurd” (Tertullian) was its embrace of (1) transcendent deity in Yahweh/Father, (2) incarnate deity in Jesus/Son, and (3) immanent deity in the Holy Spirit. Philosophically, each mutually excludes the other, and thus are logically and categorically contradictions. Being, for example, must be an entity (whether human, animal, deity, vegetable, mineral), and thus immanent (all-pervasive) would exclude a specific identifiable “being.”
But religion does not have to obey the rules of logic, evidence, or categories of thought. In fact, it is its “violation tags” (Pascal Boyer’s phrase) that gives religion its specific features (also, Virgin Birth). Coupling “pan” and “theism” is itself a violation tag in Boyer’s lexicon (as it is inherently contradictory). Theism traditionally evokes a Divine Being, but the “pan” is an immanence of ubiquity, denying that divinity resides in a particular Being. Thus, “pantheism” is an oxymoron and contradiction. But if Spinoza and other pantheists are understood in their terms, they are denying a “Being” and asserting the ubiquity of immanence. How the “supernatural divine” differs from the “natural secular” is another question that seems unanswerable under pantheism.
“At best…we could say the Founders defined God’s attributes to a particular level of generality, and then left the individual citizen to fill in the “gaps.”"
This is a point of agreement. Yeah! A good portion of the historical record on the Founders beliefs come from public statements, and so it makes sense to me that they left it “general”. They were trying to unite colonies, of which different Christian sects were predominant, so the tenor of their public statements was by necessity one of “general” Christianity, to allow for unity. As far as how they were privately, I’ve no doubt it varied quite a bit, with Franklin and Jefferson, for example, being more of the “free spirits” than say the reserved Washington.
But back to the point of their “general” Christianity, we could also agree that such statements were made because of a conviction that every citizen should be free from coercion of religious belief, which works just fine in concert with their attempts to forge unity. The Virginia Declaration of Rights for example:
“[We hold] that religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator and the manner of discharging it, can be directed by only reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and therefore, all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience; and that it is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love, and charity towards each other.”
Was such a belief straight from the Bible/the Biblical God? I do believe it was, but perhaps Maritain understood the nuance/give and take a bit better:
“Under the inspiration of the Gospel, the secular consciousness has understood the dignity of the human person and has understood that the person, while being a part of the State, yet transcends the State, because of the inviolable mystery of his spiritual freedom and because of his call to the attainment of supra-worldly possessions. What has been gained for the secular consciousness, if it does not veer to barbarism, is faith in the rights of the human person, as a human person, as a civic person, as a person engaged in social and economic life and as a working person; and it is faith in justice as a necessary foundation for common life, and as an essential property of the law, which is not law if it is unjust.”
So out of such a belief, the give and take between Christianity — no longer coereced by the state — and the “secular conciousness” which springs in its place, is why Washington reminded us in his farewell address to make sure we understand the relationship between staying free and staying virtuous.
From here we would begin to disagree, as I am partial to the Novak’s assessment that only Christianity and Judaism possess the “central concepts necessary to the American conception of rights”.
“Scof” seems to have a “selective” understanding of social embeddedness. Jacques Maritain, who he cites, was a “communitarian,” and highly influential in producing “Gaudium et spes” [The Church in the Modern World, 1964] at Vatican II. In deference to these Catholic communitarian concepts, I cannot imagine 18th C. American colonies endorsing the hegemony of Papist theories (which THEN endorsed the divine-right of monarchs, right out of the Bible, before the 20th C. “spirit” redirected them to communitarianism).
Scof also holds that Judeo-Christian “central concepts necessary to the American conception of rights.” Okay, Scof: Cite chapter and verse in support of such outrageous claims! The concept of “rights” is an Enlightenment conception, and nary a biblical verse even suggests such a thing. The conception of “human rights” has NO biblical basis. In fact, Saint Paul actually endorses patriarchy and slavery (see Philemon and Ephesians, for heaven’s sake). So much for “rights” from the Judeo-Christian tradition! The only “right” the Bible endorses is that of Israelite’s taking the lands that Yawheh’s “elect” can expropriate from the native squatters (which they used again in 1948). When Yahweh favors a people, they don’t need “rights,” they only need a stronger deity than the natives. (Calvin’s use of this principle in Geneva got him nowhere.) “Divine Election” (Jewish or Calvinistic) always generates contempt for arrogance of such “privilege.”
The word “virtue” is NOT biblical either. Use a comprehensive concordance, Scof! “Virtue” is entirely a Greek notion. The Bible does not even suggest/use it. Indeed, the Bible defies the very concept. “Virtue” entails justice, prudence, courage, and temperance — not a word of which is found in the Bible in terms of “virtue.” Jesus’s/Paul’s extol of humility offended the Greek’s sense of pride, virtue (arete), and dignity! Paul’s Platonism gave the Greek-state communities something “eternal and everlasting” to decry Aristotleanism’s particularism and the diminuition of pride. When Aquinas imported Aristotle into Christianity in the 13th C., he was branded a heretic.
The conservative mantra of virtue is not even conservative! Conservatives from Edmund Burke through Russell Kirk and GWB hold the “biblical” values of “tradition, history, and institutions,” of which the Christian Church had been “understood” as the apogee, until the Reformers inverted “Church” into “believers.” Biblical readers, which even the medievals understood, could “use” the Bible to justify anything, especially if one chose O.T. citations, in which the “elect” Jews get divine preference. (The N.T. is not as elastic as O.T.) Calvin’s “Protestant Work Ethic” is based entirely on ONE quip from Deuteronomy (8:17-18), which is antithetical to everything Jesus taught! Calvin was a legalistic “pseudo-Jew” who supported the “elect” concept to its extreme. (He entirely misunderstood the Pualine notion of “predestination.” Luther and Calvin both misunderstood the doctrine of “justification,” too — see, J. H. Newman’s “Lectures on the Doctrine of Justification,” 1838.)
The Enlightenment “free-thinkers” used the religious confusion of the times AGAINST the dogmatists. Their religious PRIDE would not allow one interpretation of the Bible to reign over another. The free-thinkers saw an opening, and they exploited the dogmatists’ insecurities by demanding NO hegemony of others in religious matters. The Calvinists (all five versions), Anabaptists, Lutherans, and Second Awakening folk were more suspicious of EACH OTHER’S religious hegemony, that they embraced “no church,” rather than the others’ church. Virtue was not even in their minds. Tyranny was! Letting the tyrannical elders of one Christian denomination dominate the “others” was too intolerable to their own provincial salvation (Maritain would have been put in the stocks as a Papist). Damn the nation. Their eternal souls were at stake over whose interpretation prevailed (a lesson they still had NOT learned from their ancestors experience in European “national church” States).
Enter saner minds. Enter those who could (and did) use internecine religious animosity to THEIR and their new nation’s interests. I would have preferred Jefferson’s “wall of separation,” but we got a democratic compromise over no “established” religion or church, ONLY because of Christian PRIDE. Whatever works! The Devil is in the details, but the Religion Hegemonists’ PRIDE was all it took to get a consensus to exclude dominance over each other. Praise Jesus or Satan, but I’ll praise the Enlightenment thinkers bold enough to use the arrogant against each other. James and Pierce thought THEY were the first pragmatists?
It’s not selective understanding, its just not fully informed :) Towards that sincere thanks for reply. Certainly Pride played a role on both parts (or why else do you use the term Enlightenment, and so proudly pronounce the “free thinkers” as such?), its why I stand by the notion of “give and take” between the two spheres. Fundamentally (crudely?) put, the “Enlightenment” didn’t occur in a social vacuum; the central concepts of Judaism and Christianity were necessary to help the rise of the American conception of rights , and are essential to their maintenance as well.
Towards my sarcasm to the use of the term “Enlightenment”, I’d point to several sources, but Roberty Kraynak in particular, whose thoughts any free thinker I would think can, at the least, “run with”…
Finally, as far as free thinking, Rowe’s earlier posts do challenge my thoughts and predilections…
Scof, you raise a valid point. Certainly, the Enlightenment arose out of the European Christian past. But as much as a reaction as an embeddedness. The Enlightenment’s central preoccupation (which took centuries to develop) was tyranny. Tyranny by the Church. Tyranny by the Monarch. In Madison, Tyranny of the Majority! In several and joint maneuvers, the Enlightenment discovered that most social problems had a tyrannical base at its foundation. So, while it is true that Protestant Christianity was the “context” of the Enlightenment’s evolution, it was as much (if not more) by reaction than embeddedness. When one looks at the Constitution through “anti-tyrannical” eyes (that most Founders had), one sees a remarkable product of ingenuity to prevent all forms of tyranny. Seen in that light, a light we today have largely lost, it is almost supernatural that the first free and open society to free itself from all forms of tyranny occurred at all. 200 years can be both a long and a brief time. When we forget the tyrannies that the Enlightenment earnestly overthrew, we forget just how recent an innovation pluralistic liberal democracies are in human history. And how easy it is to surrender that achievement through fear. A demagogue is defined by his/her use of fear in just this manner.