by Bruce Bawer
• Addressing the Christian Coalition's 1996 convention, Senator Jesse Helms claimed that Benjamin Franklin told the Constitutional Convention that "we are forgetting the Providence from whom we receive all our blessings" and that America was "born in His [God's] name." According to Helms, Franklin then suggested that the delegates all "get down on our knees and pray." Helms admitted that historians deny the incident ever happened, but he offered no evidence that it did happen; indeed, he seemed to be implying either that historians were conspiring to misrepresent the incident or that the truth should not stand in the way of a story that serves the Religious Right's purposes. Helms drew from his anecdote the conclusion that "this nation was created in God's name and with His grace, and we have made the mistake of forgetting it." America, he said, "was intended to be" a Christian nation, "and I will argue with anybody who says that's wrong."
Another version of Helms's Franklin quotation appeared in a special 1995 religion issue of the conservative journal American Enterprise that also cited passages from Madison, Adams, Washington, Webster, and Lincoln. The quotations were meant to show that "America was founded as a religious sanctuary," that the founding fathers were actively interested in promoting religion, and that they didn't think the federal government "should be strictly neutral in the contest between agnosticism, atheism, and religious faith." (Why Webster and Lincoln were included in a list of founding fathers was not clear.) Typical of the quoted passages are the following:
Franklin: Have we forgotten that powerful Friend? Or do we imagine we no longer need His assistance? . . . God governs the affairs of men. . . . I therefore beg that henceforth prayers imploring the assistance of Heaven . . . be held in this assembly every morning, before we proceed to business.
Adams: The highest glory of the American revolution was this: that it connected in one indissoluble bond the principles of Christianity with the principles of civil government.
Washington: Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. . . . It is impossible to govern rightly without God and the Bible.
For American Enterprise to serve these quotations up as evidence that the founding fathers were devout Christians by today's legalistic standard is ludicrous. What they reflect is less profound piety or Christian boosterism than a pragmatic recognition of religion as a force for social stability and a spur to moral action.
Ralph Reed, who until recently served as the executive director of the Christian Coalition, vociferously denies in his 1996 book, Active Faith, that the organization views America as a Christian nation. Yet in March 1997, Reed's then boss, Robertson, gave over an entire hour of The 100 Club to hawk a new videotape claiming that America is indeed a Christian nation. Entitled Victory in Spite of All Terror and produced by Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network, the videotape asserted that Americans were God's special people, created for the sole purpose of spreading the gospel. Yet, beginning in the 1920s, they had turned their backs on this purpose, "trad[ing] God's mission for worldly pursuits." The videotape recounts the ensuing "battle for America": In the twenties, people like Margaret Sanger and Clarence Darrow "attempted to humiliate God"; in the thirties, under FDR, "America shifted its trust from God to government"; in later decades, the Supreme Court, which in 1878 had affirmed that "this is a Christian nation," betrayed America's Christian heritage by removing prayer, religion classes, and Bibles from public schools. An ad for the videotape on CBN's official Web site proclaimed: "America stands at the crossroads of history! ... Will we honor our centuries-old covenant, or turn our back on destiny?" The videotape made it clear that for Robertson and his constituents, the conviction that America is a Christian nation is fundamental. It is what "the battle for America" is all about.
Again and again, legalistic Christians go back to the beginning—the founding fathers—to make their case. Robertson, in one of his books, contends that the founding fathers were indeed Christians by his definition, and quotes from their writings to support this claim. Yet his citations are from official documents containing formulaic references to the deity that anyone then would have been in the habit of employing. Robertson notes, for example, that Washington dated his signature to the Constitution "In the year of our Lord, 1787." Robertson's ludicrous comment: "There was only one Lord whose birthday dated back 1787 years: Jesus Christ. The founding document of the United States of America acknowledged the Lordship of Jesus Christ, because we were a Christian nation." Robertson cites the founding fathers in the same dishonest, proof-texting way that he cites biblical passages, taking them out of context and insisting that they mean something that, when read in context, they plainly do not.
Even as he distorts the founding fathers' record on religion, Robertson accuses his opponents of doing so. On July 2, 1996, he complained on The 700 Club that "There has been a revision of history reminiscent of the book 1984" on the part of people who want to deny that the founding fathers were Christians. The United States, Robertson insisted, was founded by "devout Christians." Jefferson, he said, "was claimed to be a deist but he was much more of a Christian than many that claim to be Christian today." Robertson admitted that Thomas Paine—who, unlike the other founding fathers, wrote extensively about his religious views—was a deist, but maintained that most of the founders "were deeply committed to the historic Christian religion." Routine passing references to the founding fathers are common on Robertson's program. For example, on December 5,1996, the day after a Hawaii court ruled in favor of same-sex marriage, Robertson told his 700 Club audience that "Jefferson said . . . our liberties are a gift of God," but that "we are trampling on God's law" and risking his wrath through such actions as the Hawaii ruling.
Were the founding fathers Christians by today's legalistic standards? The record shows unequivocally that they were not. To examine writings by the principal framers of the Declaration (Jefferson, Franklin, and Adams), by the chief author of the Constitution (Madison), and by the "father of our country" (Washington) is to note the striking degree to which they all shared attitudes toward religion that Robertson would definitely not consider Christian.
First, all these men emphasized the supreme importance of individual reason and conscience—not ecclesiastical authority and dogma—in the shaping of personal faith. Jefferson said that he was "not generally disposed to seek my religion out [i.e., outside] of the dictates of my own reason and feelings of my own heart." Our first president agreed; his biographer James Thomas Flexner wrote that "Washington could not accept conclusions on the basis of authority or long-standing belief; he was no mystic, he felt he did not know and could never know." Virtually all the founding fathers would have agreed with Madison's statement that there is a natural "finiteness of human understanding" when it comes to matters of the spirit.
For the founding fathers, what followed from this recognition of man's limited understanding of God and his universe was that reasonable people should not be dogmatic and should respect others' rights to believe as they wished. Madison asserted that "the Religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man." Washington wrote to General Lafayette that he was "no bigot myself to any mode of worship" and was "disposed to indulge the professors of Christianity in the church, that road to heaven which to them shall seem the most direct, plainest, easiest, and least liable to exceptions." Washington added that he didn't care which religion immigrants to the United States might profess: "If they are good workmen, . . . they may be Mohammedans, Jews, or Christian of any sect, or they may be atheists." A shocking sentiment in these days of Pat Robertson, who laments the influx into America of people who don't share his beliefs.
The founding fathers, to be sure, recognized religion's valuable social role. Flexner writes of Washington that "organized religion appealed to him primarily ... as a civilizing force within secular society." And Madison declared that "belief in a God All Powerful wise and good is so essential to the moral order of the World and to the happi
ness of man, that arguments which enforce it cannot be drawn from too many sources." Yet all the founding fathers cherished the separation of church and state. "There is not a shadow of right in the general government to intermeddle with religion," Madison affirmed. "Its least interference with it would be a most flagrant usurpation." Madison inserted a "freedom of conscience" article in the Virginia Declaration of Rights, and as a member of the Virginia House of Delegates he vigorously opposed a 1784 resolution to tax citizens "for the support of the Christian religion." Shortly thereafter both he and Jefferson fought a Virginia bill that would make Anglicanism an established church; Madison's petition against church establishment won such solid public backing that it spelled the beginning of the end for state support of churches or of religious education in the United States until the ascent of the Religious Right almost two hundred years later. That petition stated that "in matters of religion, no man's right is abridged by the institution of civil society, and that religion is wholly exempt from its cognizance." Comparing established churches to the Spanish Inquisition, Madison wrote that "they have been seen to erect a spiritual tyranny" that in turn upholds "the thrones of political tyranny; in no instance have they been seen the guardians of the liberties of the people."
The founding fathers' open-mindedness characteristically transcended mere tolerance to embrace the possibility that Christians could—horrors!—learn things about God from other religions. Franklin's willingness to learn was so pronounced, in fact, that his biographer Esmond Wright speaks of him as exhibiting "a touch of polytheism." Page Smith writes that Adams "wished for a 'more liberal communication of sentiments' between all the nations of the world on the subject of religious beliefs. Each nation doubtless had something to contribute, since each might be assumed to have gained at least a partial apprehension of the divine." Adams himself wrote that he hoped "translations of the Bible into all languages and sent among all people . .. will produce translations into English and French, Spanish and German and Italian of sacred books of Persians, the Chinese, the Hindoos, etc., etc., etc. Then our grandchildren and my greatgrandchildren may compare notes and hold fast all that is good." There is nothing here of the animus toward ecumenism and toward familiarity with other faiths that today's legalistic Christians display.
Unlike Pat Robertson and company, the founding fathers placed far less emphasis on any theological doctrine than they did on Jesus' gospel message of love. Wright notes that Franklin, though he belonged to an Episcopal church in Philadelphia, "came to honor virtue far more than orthodoxy; his ethic was social." "The most acceptable Service we render to him [God]," wrote the author of Poor Richard's Almanack, "is doing good to his other Children." Wright says that "from this reasonable man's creed, theology and dogma were noticeably absent." Flexner likewise notes our first president's "lack of doctrine and dogmatism." (He also points out that Washington preferred to speak of "Providence" rather than of "God" and was more likely to spend a Sunday writing letters than attending church.) Adams valued Christianity for bringing "the great principle of the law of nature and nations—Love your neighbor as yourself, and do to others as you would have that others should do to you—to the knowledge, belief and veneration of the whole people," and said that "if mankind should come someday to live in universal brotherhood it would be because it came finally to accept the great Christian ideals as its own."
Even as they extolled Christian moral principles, the founding fathers expressed skepticism about the chief Christian doctrines, including Jesus' divinity. "I have . . . some Doubts as to his Divinity," wrote Franklin, "tho' it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an Opportunity of knowing the Truth with less Trouble." Adams, says Page Smith, became "more and more plainly Unitarian" as he aged. Though a regular churchgoer, Adams "rejected the notion of the Trinity as superstition and with it the idea of the divinity of Christ." And Jefferson, who according to his biographer Fawn M. Brodie "despised clergymen all his adult life" and evinced a "hatred of the established faith" that was well-nigh unparalleled in his time, made it one of his chief aims during the Revolution to quell the power of the Anglican Church. A year before his death, he described himself as a Unitarian; several years earlier, he declined to serve as a baptismal sponsor because he did not accept the Trinity. Jefferson dissented so strongly from many conventional Christian tenets, indeed, that during the 1800 presidential election campaign he was, as Dumas Malone points out, "denounced ... in press and pulpit as an atheist"; when, years later, the House of Representatives considered purchasing his library, it was objected that his books were "irreligious." Brodie notes that when Jefferson first ran for president, "clergymen told their parishioners that a vote for Jefferson was a vote against Christianity, and warned that if he won they would have to hide their Bibles in their wells."
In fact none of the founding fathers was truly irreligious. All were essentially deists. Wright sums up Franklin's belief system as "a rational but pragmatic deism." Flexner states bluntly that "George Washington was, like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, a deist." (A footnote points out that despite Washington's deism, "the forgers and mythmakers have been endlessly active in their efforts to attribute to Washington their own religious acts and beliefs." This footnote was written some years before Pat Robertson and company began seeking to enlist the founding fathers retrospectively in their cause.)
Like many of their deist contemporaries, the founding fathers tended to invoke "Nature" as an authority. In their view, human beings had a "natural right" to religious freedom, and the greatest evidence for God's existence lay in Nature's order and beauty. Franklin's "Articles of Belief" begins with a quatrain from Cato:
Here will I hold—If there is a Pow'r above us (And that there is, all Nature cries aloud, Thro' all her works), He must delight in virtue And that which he delights in must he happy.
Page Smith writes that Adams drew "his conviction of God's existence . . . primarily from the extraordinary variety and beauty of the observable world—'the amazing harmony of our solar system . . . the stupendous plan of operation' designed by God to act as a particular role 'in this great and complicated drama.'"
Despite their deism, most of the founding fathers described themselves as Christians—a label that Pat Robertson would deny to anyone nowadays who held similar views. Jefferson wrote a friend: "I am a Christian, in the only sense he [Jesus] wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence; and believing he never claimed any other." And Adams said that Christianity "will last as long as the world. Neither savage nor civilized man without a revelation could ever have discovered or invented it. Ask me not then whether I am a Catholic or Protestant, Calvinist or Arminian. As far as they are Christians, I wish to be a fellow disciple with them all." One could hardly imagine a clearer statement of membership in the Church of Love, not of Law; and one could hardly imagine a notion of Christianity less congenial to the likes of Pat Robertson.
The founding fathers' religious beliefs, then, fell far beyond the narrow orthodoxy insisted upon nowadays by Pat Robertson and other legalistic Christians. And yet Robertson pretends otherwise. Though he accuses his opponents of rewriting history in Orwellian fashion, it is clear who is really doing so. But one should hardly be surprised, for what Robertson has done to the founding fathers is, as we shall see, nothing compared to the way he has distorted the meaning of the life of a certain carpenter from Galilee.
Robertson has made a point of the fact that new members of Congress are routinely presented with a Bible. This indicates plainly, he argues, that America is a Christian nation. Ralph Reed, too, manages to work a mention of the Congressional Bible, "an edition of the Scriptures commissioned by the U.S. Congress shortly after the founding of the nation," into Active Faith. What both Robertson and Reed fail to mention is that the Bible in question is in fact Jefferson's redaction o
f the four Gospels, which he entitled The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. Jefferson's Bible consists of a single account of Jesus' ministry made up of passages from all four Gospels; it omits the entire Old Testament, the Acts of the Apostles, the Epistles, and the Book of Revelation. It also omits duplications, omits gospel passages that seemed to Jefferson to be at odds with the spirit of Jesus, and omits the Resurrection. It ends with Jesus being laid in his tomb.
Jefferson explained that his Bible was "a document in proof that I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus," and that he had compiled it because he felt that Jesus' teachings had suffered as a consequence of having been written down not by Jesus himself but by "the most unlettered of men, long after they had heard them from him, when much was forgotten, much misunderstood, and presented in every paradoxical shape." Jefferson's aim was to remove from the gospel things that, in his view, had obviously been added on by the gospel writers themselves, and thus to give readers a purer picture of an individual who was "the most innocent, the most benevolent, and the most eloquent and sublime character that ever has been exhibited to man."
"Like other Enlightenment rationalists," writes the theological historian Jaroslav Pelikan, "Jefferson was convinced that the real villain in the Christian story was the apostle Paul, who had corrupted the religion of Jesus into a religion about Jesus." This corruption had resulted in "the monstrosities of dogma, superstition, and priestcraft, which were the essence of Christian orthodoxy. The essence of authentic religion, and therefore of the only kind of Christianity in which Jefferson was interested, needed to be rescued from these distortions, so that the true person and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth might rise from the dead page." Pelikan notes the opposition drawn by Jefferson and others "between the universal religion of Jesus and the Christian particularity of the religion of Paul": Though Paul insisted that in Christ there was no slave or free, no Greek or Jew, no male or female, he erected barriers between Christian and non-Christian that Jesus himself, in Jefferson's view, would have found repugnant.