Book Review: The Founding Fathers and the Debate Over Religion in Revolutionary America

Is America a Christian nation? Here is a book of the American founders in their own words.

Harris, Matthew L., and Thomas S. Kidd, eds. The Founding Fathers and the Debate Over Religion in Revolutionary America: A History in Documents. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Introduction

Matthew Harris and Thomas Kidd offer the reader a guided tour of an important neighborhood of America’s history. At the time of America’s founding, religious liberty was a major issue and debate. It might have been the issue and debate which shaped America’s constitution and its society. All who desire to participate in the ongoing discussion about religious liberty in America have been served well by these two historians and their work in producing this short book.

Book Summary

This small volume is a weighty compilation of various documents that tell the story of America’s founding fathers’ religious vocabulary and vantage points. The structure of the book is six chapters, which are themselves divided by the chronological and institutional development of the American nation. Many of the big names, those who played key roles in the making of the new nation, wrote or contributed to pieces ranging from personal memorabilia to international treaties, from state constitutions to federal legislation. So too did religious leaders outside of the halls of political power contribute mightily to the ongoing conversation about religion and politics at America’s founding.

Chapter One

Chapter one contains a series of documents originating during the Revolutionary War, just before America became a nation of its own. The Reverend Jacob Duché was the Anglican rector of Christ Church in Philadelphia and the chaplain of the Continental Congress in 1775. Duché prayed as though the war was due (at least in part) to God’s judgment upon the land and the people, but he also looked to God’s mercy and providence to bring about a future in which there would be a restoration of “brotherly union and concord, which ought ever to subsist inviolate in the great family to which we belong!”[1] Alexander Hamilton also wrote, in a pamphlet called The Farmer Refuted, with the assumption that all that occurs in the “natural” world does so under the creative and providential power of “the supreme being.”[2] The Declaration of Independence too is shot through with the presupposition of these same axioms. The language and worldview of Protestant Christianity was the proverbial water in which these colonial America leaders swam.

Chapter Two

Chapter two includes portions of some of the state constitutions, which were ratified between 1776 and 1780, as well as various public arguments both for and against the establishment of state churches. The Pennsylvania Constitution (1776) included the language that “all men have a natural and unalienable right to worship God Almighty according to the dictates of their own consciences and understandings.”[3] However, South Carolina wrote in its Constitution (1778), “The Christian Protestant religion shall be deemed, and is hereby constituted and declared to be, the established religion of this State.”[4]

South Carolina even included a definition, along with four features, of a church in article thirty-eight of its Constitution. A church was only “constituted” as such “whenever fifteen or more male persons, not under twenty-one years of age, professing the Christian Protestant religion” agree to “unite themselves in a society for the purposes of religious worship.”[5] Each church was required to “give themselves a name or denomination by which they shall be called and known in law,” and the petition for incorporation as a church had to include the society’s agreement and subscription to five articles: (1) “That there is one eternal God, and a future state of rewards and punishments;” (2) “That God is publicly to be worshipped;” (3) “That the Christian religion is the true religion;” (4) “That the holy scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are of divine inspiration, and are the rule of faith and practice;” and (5) “That is is lawful and the duty of every man being thereunto called by those that govern, to bear witness to the truth.”[6]

Isaac Backus and Baptists in Granville, Massachusetts, all argued for greater freedom of religion in New England. Benjamin Franklin also promoted the notion of eliminating civil support for religious institutions, saying, “When a Religion is good, I conceive that it will support itself; and when it does not support itself, and God does not take care to support, so that its Professors are oblig’d to call for the help of the Civil Power, ‘tis a Sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one.”[7] Still, the arguments for religious establishment and the institutional practice thereof remained intact for several decades more in Massachusetts.

Chapter Three

Chapter three focuses on the religious contents of the federal constitution and the arguments both for and against various features of it. Great men like Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, James Madison, John Adams, and Patrick Henry all had sometimes slightly and other times significantly different views about how religion should be referenced in America’s founding document. Some Anti-Federalists even lamented, the absence of “a declaration of Protestant Christianity, an acknowledgment of God or Jesus, or a statement affirming the ‘Great Governor of the World,’ as the Articles of Confederation… did.”[8] However, they were quite adamant that religious oaths “violated the principles of religious liberty.”[9]

Several amendments to the Constitution became critical to its ratification among the various states, and the first was prominent in the discussion. Harris and Kidd wrote, “Although members of Congress could not reach a consensus about what religious liberty meant, at the very least it was agreed that the federal government should not interfere with the ‘free exercise’ of religion or support a state-sponsored church.”[10] Some states already had their own state-sponsored church, and others were quite opposed to establishment altogether, but they all agreed that the federal government should stay out of the business of legislating in ecclesiastical affairs.

Chapter Four

Chapter four includes documentation that America’s political leaders continued to wrestle over the practical application of First Amendment. Congress maintained the office of Congressional Chaplain, including federal funding, and the federal government issued public declarations of thanksgiving and special days of prayer and fasting for the nation. Two treaties are of particular note in this chapter – the Treaty of Tripoli (1797) and the treaty between the United States and the Kaskaskia Indians (1803).

Article eleven of the Treaty of Tripoli says, “ as the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself, no charter of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of [Muslims]… it is declared… that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.”[11] Such a strong negative statement against the notion that America was “founded on the Christian religion,” however, did not preclude the United States government from promising to fund a Roman Catholic priest and church building as part of its treaty with the Kaskaskia Indians. Article three of that treaty includes,

“whereas, The greater part of the said tribe have been baptized and received into the Catholic church to which they are much attached, the United States will give annually for seven years one hundred dollars toward the support of a priest of that religion, who will engage to perform for the tribe the duties of his office, and also to instruct as many of their children as possible in the rudiments of literature. And the United States will further give the sum of three hundred dollars to assist the said tribe in the erection of a church.”[12]

It appears that the federal government saw no conflict between religious liberty and the complete funding of an established church in a context where such an establishment was desirable to the inhabitants. Again, there was much agreement that the federal government should not impose religious establishment upon its citizens, but religious liberty did preclude the encouragement and even the support of religious institutions and practices.

Chapter Five

Chapter five focuses squarely on the dissenting voice of John Leland, a Baptist minister in Virginia, and the Republican advance of Thomas Jefferson. Leland was a radical, even among eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Baptists in America, and his arguments against religious establishment at times approached what seemed hyperbole. Thomas Jefferson, the American President acclaimed for his advocacy of religious freedom, took center stage in this debate. It was his political groundwork that influenced the formation of the First Amendment, and his invention of a “new paradigm” that has shaped the American perspective of this first freedom.

Baptists from the Danbury Association petitioned the newly elected President Jefferson for his help in gaining greater freedom in matters of religion. Jefferson’s letter in response is now infamous. Harris and Kidd wrote, “Jefferson’s reply, which is a classic in American letters, established for the first time a new metaphor in the American lexicon: the ‘wall of separation between church and state.’ That simple phrase became the basis of a new paradigm for religious freedom in the United States.”[13] One can hardly overstate the importance of Jefferson’s new metaphor or the newness of such a paradigm.

Chapter Six

Chapter six is a compilation of various writings by Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Patrick Henry, Samuel Adams, Roger Sherman, William Livingston, and Elias Boudinot. These men were members of their state or the federal congress, signers of the Declaration of Independence, or the President of the nation. Among them were Enlightenment deists, Congregationalists, an Anglican, and even an Evangelical. Their own religious views ranged from orthodox Christianity to heretical, but their vocabulary and vantage points were heavily marked by Protestant Christianity.

Conclusion

This volume is short, only one hundred and eighty-five pages, but it provides incredible primary source documentation on matters of religion at the founding of the American nation. The debate rages on today regarding the appropriateness of referring to America as a “Christian nation,” but those who engage in this ongoing conversation would do very well to consult the contents of this book. It is both accessible and scholarly, and the contextual commentary provides helpful historical background that sets primary sources in an understandable format. Matthew Harris and Thomas Kidd have provided readers with a wonderfully curated and thoughtfully arranged set of primary sources so that readers may see for themselves what was the substance and development of religious establishment in America during a time when it was not at all clear which direction the new nation would go.

[1] Harris and Kidd, The Founding Fathers and the Debate Over Religion in Revolutionary America, 28.

[2] Harris and Kidd, The Founding Fathers and the Debate Over Religion in Revolutionary America, 29.

[3] Harris and Kidd, The Founding Fathers and the Debate Over Religion in Revolutionary America, 41.

[4] Harris and Kidd, The Founding Fathers and the Debate Over Religion in Revolutionary America, 43.

[5] Harris and Kidd, The Founding Fathers and the Debate Over Religion in Revolutionary America, 43.

[6] Harris and Kidd, The Founding Fathers and the Debate Over Religion in Revolutionary America, 44.

[7] Harris and Kidd, The Founding Fathers and the Debate Over Religion in Revolutionary America, 59.

[8] Harris and Kidd, The Founding Fathers and the Debate Over Religion in Revolutionary America, 88.

[9] Harris and Kidd, The Founding Fathers and the Debate Over Religion in Revolutionary America, 89.

[10] Harris and Kidd, The Founding Fathers and the Debate Over Religion in Revolutionary America, 101.

[11] Harris and Kidd, The Founding Fathers and the Debate Over Religion in Revolutionary America, 123.

[12] Harris and Kidd, The Founding Fathers and the Debate Over Religion in Revolutionary America, 129.

[13] Harris and Kidd, The Founding Fathers and the Debate Over Religion in Revolutionary America, 149.