Some politically inclined religionists have attempted to convert the founders’ faith into a modern mandate for overt state support of the church, i.e., Christianity and, one suspects, once that jump is made, their particular branch of it. But it should be reasonable to suppose that the founders’ faith could be at once deep and their suspicion of religion controlling public life equally deep. In fact, it is easy to show this to be so from a reading of their own words.
I’ve recently sampled yet again some of the luminous correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. They had been political rivals for years, and both had served as president of the new republic. In the afterglow the two sages of the nation began a correspondence that continued till their deaths, within hours of each other, on July 4, 1826—the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Their letters show an amazing concurrence of thought and a constant preoccupation with matters of faith and freedom.
Jefferson, in a letter of October 28, 1813, wrote that “the law for religious freedom, having put down the aristocracy of the clergy, and restored to the citizen the freedom of the mind, and those of entails and descents nurturing an equality of condition among them, this on education would have raised the mass of the people to the high ground of moral respectability necessary to their own safety, and to orderly government.”
Then, in a letter of June 20, 1815, Adams wrote, “The question before the human race is, whether the God of nature shall govern the world by his own laws, or whether priests and kings shall rule it by fictitious miracles?”
In a letter penned January 24, 1814, Jefferson rails in some detail against the origin in English common law of the idea that “Christianity is part and parcel of the laws of the land,” a quote he attributes to Matthew Hale in the case of the King v. Taylor. “Thus we find this string of authorities all handing [sic] by one another on a single hook . . . . And who can now question but that the whole Bible and Testament are a part of the common law?” This is an interesting comment in view of the nascent premise that the United States is based on Christianity.
But the real application to this objection immediately follows in his scathing analysis of “blue laws,” which so troubled religious liberty proponents only a generation or two ago. “And that Connecticut, in her blue laws, laying it down as a principle that the laws of God should be the laws of their land, except where their own contradicted them, did anything more than express with a salvo, what the English judges had less cautiously declared without any restriction? And what, I dare say, our chief justice would swear to, and find as many sophisms to twist it out of the general terms of our declaration of rights, and even the stricter text of the Virginia ‘act for the freedom of religion,’ as he did to twist Burr’s neck out of the halter of treason. May we not say then with him who was all candor and benevolence, ‘woe unto you, ye lawyers, for ye lade men with burthens grievous to bear.’”
In a reply to this continued discussion of civil and religious power, Adams, in a letter of July 16, 1814, said, “I am bold to say that neither you nor I will live to see the course which the ‘wonders of the times’ will take. Many years, and perhaps centuries, must pass before the current will acquire a settled direction. If the Christian religion, as I understand it, or as you understand it, should maintain its ground, as I believe it will, yet Platonic, Pythagoric, Hindoo, and cabalistical Christianity, which is catholic Christianity, and which has prevailed for 15 hundred years, has received a mortal wound, of which the monster must finally die. Yet so strong is his constitution, that he may endure for centuries before he expires . . . . Our hopes, however, of sudden tranquility ought not to be too sanguine. Fanaticism and superstition will still be selfish, subtle, intriguing, and, at times furious.” And he concluded the letter and that paragraph with a warning that the resulting “fermentation” of these forces “will excite alarms and require vigilance.”
The ruminations of old men? Yes, but surely indicative of the common hopes and views shared by the patriarchs of this secular republic with such a theological vision. Yes, Adams went further in his fulminations against “papists,” and the danger to the republic. No doubt his and other similar views fed the often violent anti-Catholic outbursts that characterized this then largely protestant nation, right up to the Kennedy era. However, we must distinguish somewhat between these theories of the founders and their violent offspring in the hands of bigots. The views of such people as Adams, Jefferson, Washington, and others were shaped by the practical lessons of history and a keen sense of theology. The peasant rebellion in Germany derived from Luther’s writings, but it horrified him as a perversion of his theology. Just so, in a very telling letter Washington wrote to Arnold, we see a great sensitivity to the adherents of a doctrine he personally disavowed.
What these letters and a vast hoard of other primary evidence reveal is the lie to glib assumptions that they intended the state to get into the religion business. They were suspicious of it historically, theologically, legally, and personally. They knew theirs was a real battle for the spiritual destiny of humanity. Their best hope was for a state that could create a secular “time-out,” and, by disenabling religious favoritism and force, allow the populace to work out their personal salvation.
Correction to my editorial of May/June. Some readers noted a very curious error in the last sentence. Rather than calling for an obscure theological distinction, the sentence should have read “We must understand the difference between the kingdom of man and the kingdom of heaven.”
Lincoln E. Steed
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