Steve Waldman has been blogging some of the major arguments from his new book, Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America. He says:
As for their religious beliefs, someone in the comment thread said I was being incoherent or contradictory by saying the Big Five (Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, Washington & Madison) were neither Deists nor orthodox Christians. Again, we're viewing this through a somewhat warped lens. "Deist" and "Orthodox Christian" were not the only two spiritual choices. For one thing, each Founder was slightly different from each other, and changed throughout their lives. But if I had to pick a religion, I'd say they were sort of militant Unitarians. In other words, they had rejected or become uncomfortable with key parts of Christian doctrine and institutional behavior but they did believe in an active God, who intervened in their lives and the lives of the nation.
This is a serious problem. History is messy because people are messy. Do your opinions remain invariant? Are you always unequivocal about your beliefs? Have your personal circumstances and social contexts remained unchanged over your life? Why do people expect that historical dynamics and personages would exhibit any of these characteristics? The opinions of the Founding Fathers regarding religion must be assessed in the context of the full framework of their times as well as the sum totality of their writings. Unfortunately, those with modern axes to grind distort their overall stances by selectively presenting a few opinions of these men which might confuse contemporary audiences.
For example, from my reading it seems clear that the Founding Fathers considered themselves Christians, but would have been rejected as Christians by most modern denominations. They were most certainly cultural Christians, aware of the Anglo-Protestant roots of colonial society. But they were beyond cultural Christians in that most of them seem to have had personal views which were most definitely of a supernatural bent. John Adams was a very conventional Unitarian Christian who seems to have accepted a personal God and all the attendant miracles. Thomas Jefferson for much of his adult life was the closest to being a thoroughgoing religious skeptic with doubts about concepts such as the afterlife, but he also veered toward a more conventional supernaturalism by the end of his life.
Of course, Hindus, Muslims and Jews accept the supernatural and modern Christians don't accept them as co-religionists. Evangelical Christians even narrow the definition to those who have had a personal conscious conversion in keeping with their Radical Reformation roots. It seems none of the Founding Fathers would have accepted the Nicene Creed, and this rejection would entail their classification as non-Christians despite their own self-perception. In this way they resemble Mormons, who consider themselves Christians but are not considered as such by other denominations.
American society was different in the late 18th century. Though it seems likely that the vast majority of the population would have assented to the tenets of orthodox Christianity during this period, most were also not active members of any church. The reason for this was in large part because most Americans lived on farms and they may simply have been too distant from any Christian church to have any chance for a practical association. Within urbanization and improved transportation more and more Americans had a host of options on Sunday, and so affiliation with institutional religion increased at modest but constant rate until the 1950s, which was the high water of mark of America-the-Churched.
Among the classically educated elite of the late 18th century religious opinions were diverse. Remember that the southern gentry was by and large Anglican, a tradition which routinely accepted a latitudinarianism of belief and practice. It might surprise modern southerners that the great articulator of states rights, John C Calhoun, was a Unitarian (obscure fact, the first two Jewish Senators were from the South, both confederates). In the Middle Atlantic states many prominent Founding Fathers were from heterodox Quaker backgrounds which often required only a minimal confession of specific religious views. Further north in New England the Congregationalist milieu from which John Adams emerged was also fracturing between orthodox traditionalists and unitarians; the latter of whom would go on to form the breakaway Unitarian church which over time rejected a narrow present-tense identification with Christianity despite acknowledging the movement's historical roots within that tradition (today the Unitarian-Universalists are not members of the National Council of Churches, which is the main voice of mainline Protestantism).
The full richness and subtly of the voices of the past matter, not just the few fragments which may pander to our presuppositions. Historical context matters; the progressive of the past may be the retrograde of today. Too often we draft the past in the service of contemporary issues so as to trivialize the complexities of the ages gone by. We make the past truly relevant by not distorting it toward our ends; rather, best we let it speak for itself and serve us by witnessing to the precedents which point us to why we are where we are.
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I love history and think of it as a science when done right. Thank you for this post.
I love history, too, but I often despair of ever getting a truly accurate understanding of any historical figure. It seems inevitable to me that the primary use of history is as a rhetorical device to win arguments and curry favor.
The complexity and uncertainty of something like the Founding Fathers religious beliefs seems forever unattainable.
If nothing else I've watched scholars, who have spent years and years poring over their writings, come to flatly opposite conclusions ... and often end up with ideas surprisingly relevant to whatever the current political debate is. If these honest, well-intentioned, dedicated scholars can't come to agreement -- how can the rest of us?
I try not to be too cynical, but it seems that human nature means we will primarily use history as a giant appeal to authority. I want to convince you (or myself) of position X. So I find a historical figure you admire and find some of his writings or sayings that can be construed to support position X.
I guess I don't think history has the potential to be science -- even if done right. I admire attempts to be as objective as possible. I admire attempts to records events as accurately as possible. But I think future generations will twist, turn, and cherry-pick history for their own ends.
It's not that a think history is bunk, or just some sort of text. I just our human nature makes it near impossible to be objective and bias free. To me, the magic of science is that hard data and reproducible results are able to overcome the passions and biases of our human nature -- at least in the long run.
Perhaps a bad analogy, but I think the signal in historical data gets drowned out by the noise of human passions. And the noise increases with intensity of interest and political salience. The end result is we see patterns largely of our own making.
Science is more decidable than history, but if you ask the kinds of questions characteristic of history (including questions about the present), you'll get the kinds of answers history gets. For a long time scoientists have dreamed of finding unambiguous scientific answers to questions of the historical type, but results have been mixed, with a few successes and a lot of false positives.
From some things I read awhile back, it seems that even radical Deists like Jefferson often claimed that the Bible had been corrupted and that the real Bible supported their belief. Jefferson edited the Bible to his own specs, and seemed to believe that he had isolated the real Bible.
There were a lot of people trying for "Primitive Christianity" around 1800, and some became Unitarians and some became wacko fundamentalists. What they shared was a belief that the Bible and its interpretation had been corrupted by the Catholic Church.
Many different millenarian, dispensationist, and fundamentalist Bible reading arose during the XIXc, some of which produced forced, almost occult interpretations of the Bible. American conservative Christianity is really a very strange fruit, and it's far from unified.
If nothing else I've watched scholars, who have spent years and years poring over their writings, come to flatly opposite conclusions
re: the founding fathers, which scholars are you talking about? in this case, their writings are relatively well preserved and we know a fair amount about the culture of 1800 america, so it seems that waldman's argument is an old one and the only one really plausible in light of the evidence.
The complexity and uncertainty of something like the Founding Fathers religious beliefs seems forever unattainable.
Very much agree
Why, "????"? There are ways to answer this question, which is not an especially difficult one. There are many almost-undecidable questions in history, but this is not one of them.
People who are quoting the founding fathers for an agenda might misrepresent them, deliberately or unknowingly, but that's not a real problem for historians. And anyone who studies the problem will have to refine their concepts -- for example, Unitarians in 1800 were unlike today's Unitarians. But there's really an answer to be found. And the stripping away misrepresentations and refining concepts are two of the main jobs of the historian. It's the payoff, not something detrimental or problematic.
History never meets scientific requirement for rigor. As far as that goes, biology never meets physicists' requirements for rigor. But you're misunderstanding and misrepresenting the level of doubt.