The Founding Myth

by Andrew L Seidel

  44 For the final version of the oath see 1 Stat. 23; for the original version see Annals of Congress, House of Representatives, 1st Congress, 1st Sess., 101, entry for Monday, April 6, 1789.

  45 Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore, The Godless Constitution: The Case Against Religious Correctness, (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996) 29–31, 43.

  46 John Tyler, “Letter to Joseph Simpson, July 10, 1843,” reprinted in William & Mary Quarterly, Historical Magazine 13, no. 1 (July 1904), 1–3.

  47 Garry Wills, Under God: Religion and American Politics (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), 383.

  48 Illinois ex. rel. McCollum v. Board of Education, 333 U.S. 203, 212 (1948) (Frankfurter, J., concurring), quoting Elihu Root.

  49 Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 1, ed. Oliphant Smeaton, Modern Library Edition (New York: Random House, 1976–88), 25–26. This quote is often misattributed to older sources, including Seneca.

  50 Benjamin Rush, “A Plan of a Peace-Office for the United States,” in The Selected Writings of Benjamin Rush, ed. Dagobert D. Runes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1947), 20.

  51 George Washington to the Virginia Baptist General Committee, May 10, 1789, in George Washington: A Collection, comp. and ed. by W. B. Allen (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1988), https://perma.cc/6TRG-3JBN.

  52 Joseph Prince of the Presbytery of the Eastward to George Washington, October 28, 1789, FO-NA.

  53 Washington to the Presbyterian Ministers of Massachusetts and New Hampshire, November 2, 1789, FO-NA.

  54 Ibid.

  55 Ibid.

  56 Hamilton, Federalist, no. 69.

  57 Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton (New York: Penguin, 2004), 66.

  58 Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist Assoc., January 1, 1802, 258.

  59 Virginia Statue for Religious Freedom (1786). This text is taken from J. F. Maclear, Church and State in the Modern Age: A Documentary History (Oxford, UK: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995) 63–65, at 64.

  60 Madison to Edward Livingston, July 10, 1822, in The Writings of James Madison, vol. 9. 100–103.

  61 Madison to F. L. Schaeffer, December 3, 1821, in Letters and Other Writings of James Madison, vol. 3, (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippencott, 1867), 242–43; see also Robert S. Alley, James Madison on Religious Liberty (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1985), 82.

  62 Madison to Baptist Churches in North Carolina, June 3, 1811, in Letters and Other Writings of James Madison, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1865), 511–12.

  63 Madison to Livingston, July 10, 1822 (“There remains [in some parts of Our country] a strong bias towards the old error, that without some sort of alliance or coalition between Govt. & Religion neither can be duly supported…. The danger cannot be too carefully guarded agst.”)

  64 Madison, “Memorial and Remonstrance,” ¶ 7.

  65 Ibid ¶ 8.

  66 Ibid ¶ 5.

  67 Bishop William Meade, Old Churches, Ministers and Families of Virginia, vol. 2 (1857; repr. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1900), 99.

  68 Madison to Baptist Churches in North Carolina, June 3, 1811, 511–12.

  69 Annals of Congress. The Debates and Proceedings in the Congress of the United States (Gales & Seaton, 1834–56), 1:758, August 15, 1789 debate.

  70 Jefferson to Danbury Baptist Assoc., January 1, 1802.

  71 McCollom, 333 U.S. 203, 231 (1948) (Frankfurter, J., concurring).

  72 Madison to Livingston, July 10, 1822.

  Chapter 2 • “Religion and Morality”: Religion for the Masses, Reason for the Founders

  1 Arthur Schopenhauer, Religion: A Dialogue, and Other Essays, (1891; repr. London: Forgotten Books, 2013) 50.

  2 Jefferson to Mrs. Samuel H. Smith Monticello, August 6, 1816, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson: Being His Autobiography, Correspondence, Reports…, vol. 7, ed. H. A. Washington (New York: J. C. Riker, 1854), 28.

  3 John Adams, “A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, Against the Attack of M. Turgot in His Letter to Dr. Price, Dated the Twenty-second Day of March, 1778” in The Works of John Adams…by his Grandson Charles Francis Adams, vol. 4 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1856), 293. Link to all 10 volumes at: https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/adams-the-works-of-john-adams-10-vols.

  4 See note 24 below.

  5 William Martin, With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America (New York: Broadway Books, 2005), 32; “Graham to Enter Politics if Winners Fail to Clean Up,” Statesville Record & Landmark (Statesville, NC), July 9, 1952.

  6 Willard Sterne Randall, Ethan Allen: His Life and Times (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), 357–58, 411.

  7 Rendered as “God helps them that help themselves” in the 1736 edition. Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack (1736) from Univ. of Kansas, AmDocs: Documents for the Study of American History 1492–Present, http://www.vlib.us/amdocs/texts/prichard36.html.

  8 Versions of this quote appear in the Koran, and the same words appear in Algernon Sidney’s 1698 Discourses Concerning Government, ch. 2, section 23.

  9 George Barna, Boiling Point: How Coming Cultural Shifts Will Change Your Life (Ventura, CA: Regal repr. ed., 2003), 173.

  10 John Jay to Richard Peters, Bedford, New York, March 29, 1811, in The Correspondence and Public Papers of John Jay, vol. 4, ed. Henry P. Johnston (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1890–93), 349.

  11 John Adams to Benjamin Rush, July 24, 1789, in Alexander Biddle, Old Family Letters Copied from the Originals, series A (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippencott, 1892), 46–7.

  12 Abigail Adams to John Adams, April 28, 1783, in Letters of Mrs. Adams: The Wife of John Adams, vol. 1, ed. Charles Francis Adams (Boston: C. C. Little and J. Brown, 1840), 177–78.

  13 Ibid.

  14 See, e.g., David L. Holmes, The Faiths of the Founding Fathers 39–45, 49–51 (Oxford, UK: Oxford Univ. Press, 2006) (deists believed in “human inquiry as well as a self-confident challenge of traditional political, religious, and social ideas,” and among them were “Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe”); Allen, Moral Minority; Susan Jacoby, Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (New York: Henry Holt, 2004), 4–6.

  15 Jefferson to Mrs. Samuel H. Smith Monticello, August 6, 1816, in Writings of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 7, 28.

  16 Jefferson, February 1, 1800, diary entry in Works of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 1, 352.

  17 Jefferson to William Short, October 31, 1819, in the first and only footnote, see https://perma.cc/H3LU-DJEZ.

  18 Jefferson to Francis Van Der Kemp, April 25, 1816, https://www.loc.gov/item/mtjbib022426/. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Retirement Series, vol. 9, September 1815 to April 1816, ed. J. Jefferson Looney (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2012), 703–4.

  19 The Constitutional Convention of 1787: A Comprehensive Encyclopedia of America’s Founding, vol. 1, ed. John R. Vile (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2005), 219.

  20 Richard Brookhiser, Gentleman Revolutionary: Gouverneur Morris, the Rake Who Wrote the Constitution (New York: Free Press, 2003), 117; Howard Swiggett, The Extraordinary Mr. Morris (New York: Doubleday, 1952), 209. See also Swiggett at 179, 181, 183, 218, 220, 238 for more details on their relationship.

  21 Morris, November 9, 1789, diary entry, in A Diary of the French Revolution, ed. Beatrix Cary Davenport (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1939), vol. 1, 293.

  22 Gregg Frazer, “Gouverneur Morris and Theistic Rationalism in the Founding Era,” in Faith and the Founders of the American Republic, ed. Daniel Dreisbach and Mark David Hall (Oxford, UK: Oxford Univ. Press, 2014), 219.

  23 John Jay to Robert Morris, St. [San] Ildefonso, September 16, 1780 (“Gouverneur’s Leg has been a Tax on my Heart. I am almost tempted to wish he had lost something else.”), https://perma.cc/5Z5T-T5RZ.

  24 H. Jefferson Powell, The Moral Tradition of American Constitutionalism: A Theological Interpretation (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1993), 7–8 (noting that Christians are tempted to “treat the American political
system as theologically unique, the reflection in the political realm of Christian moral principles”), citing William J. Everett, God’s Federal Republic (New York: Paulist Press, 1988); Mark David Hall, abstract for “Did America Have a Christian Founding?,” Heritage Foundation, June 7, 2011(“In short, while America did not have a Christian Founding in the sense of creating a theocracy, its Founding was deeply shaped by Christian moral truths”), https://perma.cc/R5GJ-Z2VP (the founding fathers “firmly believed that God ordained moral standards, that legislation should be made in accordance with these standards); Mark Beliles and Stephen McDowell, America’s Providential History, 3rd ed. (Charlottesville, VA: Providence Found., 2010), 178 (“‘Virtue…Learning…Piety.’ These words are found throughout our official documents and statements of our Founders. Sometimes they are called ‘Morality,’ ‘Knowledge,’ and ‘Religion,’ such as are found in the Northwest Ordinance. ‘Religion’ meant Christianity. ‘Morality’ meant Christian character. ‘Knowledge’ meant a Biblical worldview”); Gary Bauer, “Judeo-Christian Values Make America the Light of the World,” Human Events.com, April 24, 2011, http://humanevents.com/2011/04/24/judeochristian-values-make-america-the-light-of-the-world/; Ronald R. Cherry, “The Judeo-Christian Values of America,” American Thinker.com, September 15, 2007 (“Judeo-Christian Values have a foundational role in America, beginning with the Declaration of Independence” ), http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2007/09/the_judeochristian_values_of_a.html#ixzz3WxB4CwGv.

  25 In the US, 53 percent think it is necessary to believe in God to be moral, though the number drops to 37 percent when surveying only college graduates. Pew Research Center (March 2014), “Worldwide, Many See Belief in God as Essential to Morality Richer Nations Are Exception,” https://perma.cc/V9RA-VVBJ.

  26 George Washington, Farewell Address, September 19, 1796. Madison worked on an early draft of this speech when Washington was first considering retirement after his first term. Hamilton finished the draft years later.

  27 Chernow, Alexander Hamilton, 504–8. See also Victor Hugo Paltsits, Washington’s Farewell Address, in Facsimile, with Transliterations of All the Drafts of Washington, Madison, & Hamilton… (New York: New York Public Library, 1935).

  28 Chernow, Alexander Hamilton, 507.

  29 Hamilton, Draft of Washington’s Farewell Address, [July] 1796. Hamilton’s original draft can be found in Paltsits, Washington’s Farewell Address, 192; George Washington, The Writings of George Washington, vol. 13, 308. See also http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/religion/images/vc6575th.jpg.

  30 John Adams to Massachusetts Militia, October 11, 1798, FO-NA.

  31 John Adams to Jefferson, April 19, 1817, Works of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 1, 254.

  32 Ibid.

  33 Jefferson, Retirement Library organization tree, http://tjlibraries.monticello.org/transcripts/retirementlibrary/retirementlibrary.html, The Thomas Jefferson Papers ser. 7, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/mtj.mtjbib026579.

  34 Jefferson to Matthew Carey, November 11, 1816, in Works of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 12, 41–42, at 42.

  35 Madison, Federalist, no. 10.

  36 John Stuart Mill, Autobiography (New York: Henry Holt, 1887) 45.

  37 Gordon S. Wood, Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different (New York: Penguin, 2007), 221.

  38 Ibid., 221–22.

  39 Ibid., 15.

  40 Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), 27.

  41 Ibid., 330.

  42 Baruch Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, 2nd ed., trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2001), 67.

  43 John Locke, “The Reasonableness of Christianity as Delivered in the Scriptures,” in The Works of John Locke in Three Volumes, vol. 2, ed. Pierre des Maizeaux (London: D. Browne, 1759), 509–86, at 577.

  44 Benjamin Franklin, The Works of Benjamin Franklin, including the Private as well as the Official and Scientific Correspondence, together with the Unmutilated and Correct Version of the Autobiography… , compiled and edited by John Bigelow, vol. 11 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904), 298.

  45 Ibid.

  46 Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, bk. 24, ch. 8, in The Complete Works of M. de Montesquieu, vol. 2 (London: T. Evans, 1777), 165–66, https://perma.cc/E794-6LAD.

  47 Franklin, Works of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 11, 298.

  48 Phil Zuckerman, “Atheism, Secularity, and Well-Being: How the Findings of Social Science Counter Negative Stereotypes and Assumptions,” Sociology Compass 3, no. 6 (2009): 949–71, 955.

  49 Ibid., 955.

  50 Ibid., 960–61.

  51 Ibid., 955, 961.

  52 Michael Gaddis, There Is No Crime for Those Who Have Christ (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2005), 1.

  53 Steven Weinberg, speech, American Assoc. for the Advancement of Science, Conference on Cosmic Design, Washington, DC, April 1999.

  54 Thomas Paine to Camille Jordan, The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. 4 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1896), 252.

  55 See, e.g., Jonathan Clark, English Society, 1660–1832 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000).

  Chapter 3 • Declaring Independence from Judeo-Christianity

  1 John Adams to Hezekiah Niles, February 13, 1818, in Works of John Adams, vol. 10, 283.

  2 Anson Phelps Stokes wrote that the “ideal of the Declaration [of Independence] is of course a definitely Christian one” that is clearly based on “fundamental Christian teachings.” Stokes, Church and State in the United States, vol. 2 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950), 578–79. Former judge Andrew Napolitano thinks that “in America, as we all know from basic high school social studies, we have a Constitution and a Declaration of Independence that embodies Judeo-Christian moral values.” The Big Story with John Gibson, February 7, 2005, on Fox News. Gary T. Amos and Richard Gardiner Never Before in History, ed. William Dembski (Dallas: Haughton, 1998). Amos and Gardiner wrote their “supplemental textbook” because “tens of millions of public school graduates are illiterate regarding our nation’s great history and traditions.” See www.neverbeforeinhistory.com, which is now owned by the Discovery Inst. Press, the publishing arm of the Seattle-based creationist-promoting Discovery Inst., but which can still be seen at https://perma.cc/4PXQ-HKVH. The authors claim that “if we look closely at the wording and the ideas contained in the Declaration, it becomes clear that the primary influence that shaped that document was the Christian tradition in law and theology.” Amos, Defending the Declaration: How the Bible and Christianity Influenced the Writing of the Declaration of Independence (Brentwood, TN: Wolgemuth & Hyatt, 1989).

  3 Thomas Paine, “The Rights of Man,” part 2, in The Political Works of Thomas Paine, vol. 2 (London: W. T. Sherwin, 1819), 15.

  4 Ibid.

  5 See, e.g., Akil Reed Amar, America’s Constitution: A Biography (New York: Random House, 2005), 24. Amar notes that the Declaration did not commit colonies to each other, only to independence. But see, Carlton F. W. Larson, “The Declaration of Independence: A 225th Anniversary Reinterpretation,” Washington Law Review 76 (2001): 701, 721–62, arguing that the Declaration did create “one American nation.”

  6 John Adams to James Warren, January 9, 1787, Warren-Adams Letters: Being Chiefly a Correspondence Among John Adams, Samuel Adams, and James Warren, vol. 2 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1917 and 1925), 281.

  7 The Articles of Confederation were a failed first attempt. See Barbara Silberdick Feinberg, The Articles of Confederation: The First Constitution of the United States (Brookfield, CT: Twenty-First Century Books, 2002), 13. See also Joseph J. Ellis, The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783–1789 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), xi–xvi.

  8 Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774–1789 5, ed. Worthington C. Ford et al. (Washington, DC, 1904–37): 425.

  9 Jefferson to Richard Henry Lee, May 8, 1825, FO-NA.

  10 Ibid.

  11 Ibid.<
br />
  12 Ibid.

  13 Ibid.

  14 Carl Lotus Becker, The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922), 5.

  15 Ibid., 203.

  16 Ibid., 8.

  17 Jefferson to Roger C. Weightman, June 24, 1826, in Works of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 12, 477.

  18 Stephen E. Lucas, “Justifying America: The Declaration of Independence as a Rhetorical Document,” in American Rhetoric: Context and Criticism, ed. Thomas W. Benson (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1989), 67–130.

  19 Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 292.

  20 George Wythe, remarks to Continental Congress, February 16, 1776, in Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774–1789 6: 1072.

  21 Samuel Adams to Joseph Hawley, April 15, 1776, in The Writings of Samuel Adams, vol. 3, ed. Harry Alonzo Cushing (New York: G. P. Putnam & Sons, 1907), 280.

  22 The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 10, ed. William L. Saunders (Raleigh, NC: Josephus Daniels, 1890), 512.

  23 See Becker, Declaration of Independence, 129.

  24 Stephen E. Lucas, “The Stylistic Artistry of the Declaration of Independence,” 1989, National Archives, America’s Founding Documents, https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/stylistic-artistry-of-the-declaration.

  25 King George III to Lord North, September 11, 1774, in The Correspondence of King George III, vol. 3, ed. John Fortescue (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1927–28), 131.

  26 The text of Henry’s speech is based on supposition and was first recorded by William Wirt, who was three years old when Henry gave the speech. Modern evidence suggests the speech was not in Henry’s own style but in a style of the man who was Wirt’s source, Henry Tucker. See Jim Cox, “The Speech: It May Not Be the One That Patrick Henry So Famously Made,” Colonial Williamsburg Journal (Winter 2002–3), http://www.history.org/Foundation/journal/Winter02-03/speech.cfm.