Once again: Deism & the Founding Fathers (Part One)
Dan, I finally have the time to begin to respond to your request that I "prove" the following statement:
Many -- perhaps even most -- of the Founding Fathers were deists, not theists.
You have already received some responses to this question. CobaltBlue, in particular, provided a slew of URLs, so that there is no need to repeat what she has already done. I will therefore limit myself to filling in some background and plugging a few gaps.
First, I have to admit that I probably should not have made such a categorical statement. That is, I should perhaps have qualified it as follows: "The consensus among scholars is that many -- perhaps even most -- of the Founding Fathers were deists, not theists."
The problem is, of course, that where some of the most notable Founding Fathers are concerned, the evidence is ambiguous. That is true, specifically, of Madison and Washington. (I personally would classify Madison as a believing Christian, but as one who absolutely opposed establishing Christianity as an official religion, and who insisted on the necessity of separating Church and State. Washington, on the other hand, I would place in the deist camp, despite his formal church membership.)
As for the more obscure Founding Fathers-Constitutional Convention attendees, the ones that left less of a written record behind them, it would take me many months (perhaps years!) to collect the kind of proof you insist on. Hence I am limited to citing some indirect evidence.
The Intellectual Background
First of all, the Founding Fathers were unusually well-educated (if self-educated, for the most part), and conversant with the major intellectual trends of the day.
The 18th century was dominated by the Enlightenment, that is, The Age of Reason, the Age of the Philosophers (in the sense of Men of Letters). As Carl Becker (The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers) puts it:
The philosophical empire was an international domain of which France was but the mother country and Paris the capital. Go where you like -- England, Holland, Italy, Spain, America -- everywhere you meet them, Philosophers speaking the same language, sustained by the same climate of opinion.
One of the characteristics of Enlightenment thought was the practically universal belief in the rationality and beneficence of Nature (this was before Romanticism and before Darwinism, you will remember). The God of the Enlightenment was the God of Nature. The deistic view, in short, was that since Nature seemed to work according to certain fixed principles, an Intelligent Being was responsible for setting them up in the first place. God's Natural Law guided all mankind, not just the communicants of a particular religion. Here is Voltaire's definition of Natural Law, for example:
The regular and constant order of facts by which God rules the universe; the order which his wisdom presents to the sense and reason of men, to serve them as an equal and common rule of conduct, and to guide them, without distinction of race and sect, towards perfection and happiness. Becker, ibid.
The following passage from the Declaration of Independence is fully in that spirit:
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights...
At the same time, anything that appeared to violate the Laws of Nature (e.g., miracles, the Incarnation, special divine revelations) were rejected; most sectarian beliefs were dismissed as "superstitions"; and Established Churches were regarded as oppressive, cruel, and tyrannous (vide Voltaire's "Ecrasez l'infame").
Yet Interestingly enough, it was common to see some "utility" in any kind of religious belief, for its role in "upholding morality"; as Voltaire (I think) put it, "false religion is superior to no religion at all." (It should be remembered, in this connection, that in many countries at the time, most notably France, professing atheism was a crime.)
As for Christianity in particular, the Deist view can be summarized more or less as follows:
Deists hold Jesus to be "divine" only in that he was divinely inspired (as could we all be) to empathic, rational thought, and Deism rejects the deity of Jesus, the trinity, the testimony of Jesus' miracles and the resurrection. You will find Deists expressing their love of "Primitive Christianity", which in their eyes, was derived from the original words of Jesus (eg: Sermon on the Mount), which (Deists believe) existed before the record of false miracles, and also the false doctrines of Paul, were grafted onto Christianity. While they express great admiration for Jesus, they in no way worship him.
geneva.rutgers.edu
One more point I think is relevant. The following, I think, explains why the Founding Fathers, whatever their personal religious beliefs, were generally so opposed to making Christianity the "official" religion of the United States. It also helps explain Madison's famous remark to the effect that once you establish Christianity as the official religion, there is nothing to prevent you from making some sub-sect of Christianity the official religion.
The early American colonies had all of the trappings of feudal
theocracies; each colony had, in effect, an established and tax-funded church of the Christian religion. 34 In Virginia, there were laws which provided the death penalty for speaking against the tenets of the Christian faith.Delaware prohibited anyone who was not a believer in "Trinitarian Christianity" from holding a public office. South Carolina officially declared "the Christian protestant" form of belief to be "the established religion of the State", adding: "That God is publicly to be worshipped" and "That the Christian Religion is the true religion." 35
atheists.org
But in the revolutionary period, the crusade for religious toleration (and it was a crusade, conducted against determined opposition) finally bore fruit, and was apparently accompanied by a sharp decline in church affiliation (from the same source):
....Revolutionary America was a period of official disestablishment of the assorted state religions. 36 Virginia enacted a Declaration of Rights on June 12, 1776, which provided for "free exercise of religion", and not favoring any one religious sect. That same year, religions were disestablished in Delaware, New Jersey and Pennsylvania; in 1777, New York, Georgia and North Carolina followed suit. Local and state laws against theatre were repealed, along with censorship laws as well — all to the consternation of ministers throughout the country. 37
All of this—the collapse of traditional puritan institutions, and the dis-establishment of religious bodies — created a wide-spread neurosis and anxiety throughout religious groups. Worse still for the churches, out of some 4 million persons living in America in 1790, religious groups could claim only about 5% on their scanty membership rolls.
Here are a couple of URLs for summaries of Deism in general:
deism.com
religioustolerance.org
BTW, I learned something new, which is that both the motto "In God We Trust" and the words "one nation under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance were introduced in the 20th century.
While "In God We Trust" was commissioned by Lincoln to be placed on our coins as a way to unite the nation during a bloody and vicious Civil War, it was never intended to replace our national motto. Our original (correct) motto was, "E Pluribus Unum" (Out of Many Comes One), but the Eisenhower administration in the 1950's, trying to make greater the gulf between the "good" religious Americans and the "bad" atheist Communists, enacted a law to change the motto and add the clause regarding God into the Pledge of Allegiance.
high-concepts.com
TO BE CONTINUED -- if you can stand it. <gg>
jbe
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