The American Future

by Simon Schama

  Now vines and fig trees were all very nice, especially if you lived oceanside in Rhode Island, but did this mean that Jews could, after all, be eligible to be magistrates, have the vote? It seemed indeed that it did. And this could not have been more important, because it can hardly have escaped the Jews of Newport that this was emphatically not the case elsewhere. The Jews of Baltimore, for example, had to wait until the 1820s for the Maryland “Jew Bill” which cleared matters up.

  There was someone else on hand in Newport on 18 August, for whom this little exchange was of more than casual interest: the secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson knew better than to steal the president’s thunder and diligently played second fiddle to Washington’s stentorian brass. But this particular turn in the proceedings had a special significance for him, as the principal author of the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, enacted in his and Washington’s home state four years before in 1786. The fight to keep matters religious and matters of state apart, to institute toleration and equal rights for those of all beliefs or none, was not, for Jefferson, nor for his friend James Madison, a revolutionary afterthought. It was the revolution just as much as the institution of democracy itself. In 1776 what was it that he described as “the severest contest in which I have ever been engaged”? The battle against the British in Massachusetts? No, the overthrow of a church establishment. What was the first political campaign Madison fought? The defense of dissenters in Culpeper County. If the two of them were around today and needed a flag to wave at the zealots who slaughtered New Yorkers on 9/11, the Statute of Religious Freedom would replace the Stars and Stripes. Read this, they would say, and you will read America. Jefferson’s authorship of the bill (and the much better known Declaration of Independence and his creation of the University of Virginia) were the achievements he wanted inscribed on his tombstone.

  Jefferson knew that not everyone in America felt quite the same way, especially not one of his personal bugbears: John Adams. The constitution of Massachusetts, presented and ratified by the General Court in 1780, drafted by Adams, and most usually remembered as a “mild and equitable” treatment of religion, was, in fact, nothing of the sort. But it does represent—to this day—precisely the other side of the American dialogue between the Williams–Jefferson tradition of a clean cut between public power and private conscience, on the one hand, and the Winthrop–Massachusetts side of insisting on the indispensability of Christian-grounded moral regulation for the good order of society. This argument never goes away. As I write this, the junior senator from Oklahoma, Tom Coburn, whose Web site declares him to be a member of the Muskogee New Community Church, is holding up the passage of an AIDS-assistance bill through Congress on the grounds that it includes provision for health education that pays insufficient attention to abstinence. This is purest John Adams in his Massachusetts 1780 mode, decreeing any thought of political action uncoupled from religious morality to be a reprehensible abandonment of civic responsibility.

  To those for whom Adams, a Unitarian, albeit with a Calvinist cast of temper, represents a beacon of New England liberalism, it may come as a surprise to find him so adamantly on the side of Christian public politics. But the importance he assigned to this issue is apparent from the fact that it takes up articles II and III of the Massachusetts constitution, right at the front of the document, preceded only by the ritual recycling from the Declaration of Independence (on which he had collaborated with Jefferson) that “All men are born free and equal and have certain natural, essential and unalienable rights.” Absolute freedom to exercise their conscience to the point of opting out from supporting the clergy, however, much less leading an irreligious life, was not among those natural rights. Article II states that “It is the right as well as the duty [my italics] of all men in society, publicly and at stated seasons, to worship the Supreme Being, the great Creator and Preserver of the Universe.” In other words, no American could consider himself a right citizen unless he had fulfilled that duty of public worship. Then came the sweetener, drawn from Jefferson’s rejected draft for the Virginia statute in 1778–79, and ultimately from Roger Williams and the Rhode Island charter of 1663, that “no subject” (are there still subjects in the republic?) “shall be hurt, molested or restrained in his person, liberty or estate, for worshipping God in the manner and season most agreeable to the dictates of his own conscience…provided he doth not disturb the public peace.”

  It was in article III, however, that Adams got down to serious business. His premise was, and it is expressed as if unarguable (though we have seen the impassioned Christian Roger Williams would have contested it), that “the happiness of a people and the good order and preservation of civil government, essentially depend upon piety, religion and morality.” Since “these cannot be generally diffused through a community but by the institution of the public worship of God and of public instructions in piety, religion and morality…to promote…and secure the good order and preservation of government, the people of this commonwealth have a right to invest their legislature with the power to authorise and require the several towns, parishes, precincts and other bodies politic or religious societies [as if they were interchangeable], to make suitable provision at their own expense, for the institution of the public worship of God and for the support and maintenance of public Protestant teachers of piety, religion and morality, in all such cases where such provision shall not be made voluntarily.” Notice the Protestant. Catholic worshippers and schoolteachers expecting public funding, much less Jews or “Mahometans,” could not expect to be provided for. Notice also the element of compulsion Adams has smuggled in. The good people of the commonwealth could volunteer to finance churches and religious schools, but should they wish to opt out, they would be taxed for that purpose anyway.

  It’s safe to say that what the Right likes to call the People’s Republic of Massachusetts, or “Taxachusetts,” is not the favorite state of, say, Pat Robertson or the Christian Coalition. But there is not a word of articles II and III of the constitution of 1780 with which they could possibly find fault. The document, the first of the state constitutions and meant as a template for the others, rides roughshod over Williams’s ideas and means to make moral regulation a habitually indispensable feature of American public life. Under the Adams constitution, Sunday church attendance was compulsory, the law being repealed only seven years after his death, in 1833. Blasphemy could be punished by a year’s imprisonment, a public whipping, time in the pillory, or “standing on the gallows, a rope about the neck.” That law stayed on the books in Massachusetts for sixty years after the adoption of the state constitution. And—in what would become one of the most Catholic states in the Union—a test affirming Protestantism was required for most public offices. A law defining sodomy as an “Unnatural and Lascivious Act” is still on the statute book of the commonwealth, carrying a penalty of twenty years’ jail time, although since 1974 it is deemed not to apply in cases of private consensual acts. Without noticing that the second president was the founding patriarch of its cause, the evangelical crusade in American politics was fueled by the ambition to re-create John Adams’s commonwealth of Christian virtue until this election season, when it finally ran out of gas.

  Why? Because there has always been an alternative American tradition in competition with the Massachusetts model, that of the other state that likes to call itself a commonwealth: Thomas Jefferson’s and James Madison’s Virginia of 1786. This may seem upside down. Is not the address of the Moral Majority Coalition, Lynchburg, Virginia? Is not Massachusetts gay-marriage friendly? But matters were differently assorted at the founding, and it was the hypocritical equality-mouthing slave-owning philosophical gentry who put on their statute book one of the most eloquent documents of cultural liberty ever penned.

  It was, to be sure, a precious moment of philosophical clarity and moral courage, sandwiched, rather tightly, between that other authentically American phenomenon: the outpourings of Christian instinct known as Gr
eat Awakenings, the first in the 1740s and midcentury, the second coming hard on the heels of Jefferson’s election to the presidency in 1801, which was taken by his enemies as the elevation of a shameless atheist to the highest office in the land. But in a way the Great Awakening, with its spectacular manifestations of itinerant sermonizing by the likes of George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards, and John Wesley, helped prepare the way for Jefferson and the First Amendment. When the Christian wildness, the appeal to passion over doctrine, began, between 60 and 80 percent of Americans belonged to the established churches, either Anglican or Congregationalist. But the hot-gospellers of the Awakening ignored parish boundaries, church decorum, and the obligations of hierarchy, and many of the most viscerally extravagant preachers won followings on the frontier, taking the physical ministrations of Christian revelation up rivers, into the wilderness, taking Lord Jesus to the mountains.

  By the eve of the revolution the numbers of those attending established churches had fallen below 50 percent, and in Virginia it was more like a third, with the backcountry farmers overwhelmingly Baptists or Presbyterians. And naturally the dissenting churches had a strong interest in making sure that what had been the favored establishments of British-dominated ecclesiastical order disappeared with the revolution, along with everything else about imperial rule.

  And, eventually, it was the passion, not of high-minded freethinkers like Jefferson, but of Baptist enthusiasts that would make the difference between the failure of Jefferson’s draft for toleration and its eventual successful enactment, steered by the less glamorous but politically astute James Madison through the Virginia Assembly. That connection between Christian enthusiasm and freedom of conscience, the authentically American bet that religion would flourish best if left as a matter of purely private choice, as distinct from, say, Taliban coercion, is what prevailed in that part of the United States that did not hew to the Adams version. For Europeans it may be hard to get their heads around this paradox; for America it’s second nature. And if the world wants to find a way to confront theocratic fanaticism with more than expressions of ridicule, the American way may offer a more persuasive strategy of cultural disarmament.

  Jefferson was not an atheist. In fact he thought that the observable universe, being as intricate and harmoniously engineered as it was, must presuppose some Designer, the Enlightenment’s watchmaker-deity who, once the machine was completed, allowed it to run itself, with perhaps occasional checkups for reducing (or aggravating) the friction of parts. This made Jefferson a deist, incredulous of those who conceived of the world as arbitrarily arranged physical matter. But this being so, Thomas Jefferson could not possibly have hoped to run in the election of 2008 and have any chance of winning. Though Jefferson held Jesus in high esteem as perhaps the greatest of history’s moral teachers, he thought it absurd, if not offensive, to compromise that standing by fairy tales declaring him Son of God, born of a virgin, a water-walking corpse resuscitator, and such foolishness. Anything worthwhile in the teachings of religion ought to withstand rational scrutiny if it were to be upheld. In 1787 he counseled his nephew Peter Carr to be a man, philosophically, and “shake off all of the fears and servile prejudices under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of God because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear. Read the Bible then as you would read Livy or Tacitus.” If biblical events like the sun standing still for Joshua should provoke doubt, that skepticism ought not to be shaken by being told that the story had been divinely revealed. Nothing was to be accepted merely as a matter of blind faith: “examine, therefore, candidly, what evidence there is of his being divinely inspired. The pretension is entitled to your inquiry because millions believe it.”

  This was extraordinary counsel from the benevolent Uncle Thomas, but Jefferson, in common with the Enlightenment philosophes, believed that adhesion to unexamined and irrational beliefs had been the greatest cause of contention and slaughter in the world, for there could be no arguing with those who asserted from revelation alone. Nothing about our own epoch would be likely to shake Jefferson from that view, though doubtless he would be dismayed that the human race had somehow failed to shake off its thraldom to myth. Dispose of those myths, he argued, and you would neutralize the carnage. If only mankind could somehow be persuaded to hold only those beliefs that could withstand the empirical scrutiny of reason, there was a chance for some sort of universal consensus on the characteristics of the divine that did, or did not, make sense. Then men might at last forbear from imposing their particular monopoly of revealed truth on others. Neither Taliban nor televangelist would make him feel better about the remoteness of this eventuality. In common with Roger Williams, Jefferson held that nothing, however, could justify criminalizing religious or irreligious opinion. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson described as intolerable the situation in his own state inherited from earlier laws by which anyone denying the Trinity, or questioning the divine authority of scripture, was disqualified from holding office. A second offense along these lines would disable the offender from any right to sue, and could lead on conviction to a prison sentence and the removal of his children from parental custody. “This is a summary view of that religious slavery under which a people have been willing to remain who have lavished their lives and fortunes for the establishment of their civil freedom.”

  Governments, Jefferson went on, may only have rights over qualities submitted to them in the first place, but rights of conscience have never been so submitted. “We are answerable for them to our God. The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” This position of the deist was, in fact, remarkably close to Williams the Baptist, although Jefferson’s immediate source was much more likely to have been John Locke’s Letters on Toleration, which was far better known in the eighteenth century. He might also have read the work of the Scottish schoolteacher James Burgh, written in the 1760s, making much the same case. But there was time for him to have gotten to know Roger Williams before the visit to Newport in 1790, as the Massachusetts Baptist Isaac Backus, whom Jefferson knew very well, published an edition of Williams’s work in the 1770s.

  Some of Jefferson’s sardonic militancy at this time no doubt came from keeping like company in pre-Revolutionary Paris, where intelligent sniggering at the follies of the benighted was de rigueur in the salons. His conviction that any religion worth its salt ought to be accessed through the mind, rather than through metaphysical mystery, was pure Locke, even though unlike Locke, Jefferson denied the divinity of Jesus. And some of Jefferson’s passion was a product of his frustration at the inability to get the Bill on Religious Freedom adopted by the Virginia Assembly when it had come before them in 1779, largely due to the vocal opposition of Patrick Henry. Just what was the liberty Henry had been thinking of? Jefferson might have asked himself when he had postured rhetorically “give me liberty or give me death.” Jefferson doubtless took some comfort from the fact that the assembly had also denied Henry his motion to support religious teachers from public funds: the creation, in effect, of multiple Protestant establishments. Both motions were shelved for the duration of the war. No doubt the vexed Jefferson was arrogant, remote from understanding the human craving for the myths he found so puerile. But the merest look at his draft for the statute—arguably the greatest and bravest thing he ever wrote—is to forgive him.

  “Whereas Almighty God hath created the mind free” runs the first sentence in his revised version, and with that one plangent phrase an oxymoron becomes an American truism, “all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burthens or by civil incapacitations tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness and are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our reli
gion who, being Lord of both body and mind yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either.” Thus, Jefferson continues in a high Williamsite vein, it is only the presumptuous impiety of weak men and rulers to usurp the Almighty’s sovereign power and presume to do what he refrained from. “To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions in which he disbelieves [as Henry was arguing should be the case in Virginia, and Adams would insert into the Massachusetts constitution] is sinful and tyrannical; that even the forcing him to support this or that teacher of his own religious persuasion is depriving him of the comfortable liberty of giving his contributions to the particular passions he feels most persuasive to righteousnes.” The last sentence describes exactly the American pattern of philanthropy, as good in its instinctive impulse as forced support for the clergy was bad in its moral cowardice.