Faith and the Founders
There has been a rash of books on religion and the Founders lately — like so much else, that seems to be disputed turf in the ongoing culture war known as American politics. Here’s a link to a short but balanced essay by Michael and Jana Novak at NRO, Faith of Our Fathers (hat tip: Positive Liberty). They note that even the more skeptical of the Founders were more religious than most 21st-century academics, and that none of them, not even Tom Paine, were bona fide atheists. There are a couple of nice observations that pop up in the short essay: Alexander Hamilton pleading with a reluctant minister to deliver the Holy Eucharist to him on his deathbed, and Washington’s rather un-Deistic faith that there had been Divine “interpositions” in particular real-world events that he had participated in.
Not that the Novaks endorse the “Christian Nation” idea popular among some Christians: “Some of the Founders were uncertain about the divinity of Jesus and how to think of it ….” They seem to be sketching out a middle ground, somewhat shaded towards the believing wing of the dispute. Five years ago, Michael Novak wrote a full book on the subject, On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding. Another recent book taking something like a middle position rather than one of the extremes is Jon Meacham’s American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation (see my comments on it here).
Clark and I have had some debates about this. My general take is that modern-day historians play down the Christian and religious nature of most of our Founding Fathers. Most of them were extremely religious by our standards. Even Ben Franklin, commonly described as a Deist, would probably be considered very religious by today’s standards. Yes, some of them were skeptical of established Christianity in the late 18th century, but that was mostly for the same reasons that early Church leaders did not join one of the leading sects of the 1830s. Attempts to turn the Founding Fathers into secular humanists are ridiculous, imho.
Just for giggles, take a look at Benjamin Franklin’s epitaph, written when he was 22. Not much sign of a “secular humanist” in this:
http://sln.fi.edu/franklin/timeline/epitaph.html
Comment by Geoff B — November 20, 2006 @ 4:41 pm