It's not clear, in any case, why Mr. Stewart thinks we are in danger of forgetting radical influences on the founders. Those connections were marvelously documented in "The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution" (1967), Bernard Bailyn's study of Revolutionary-era pamphlets, in which he revealed the influence of England's 18th-century "commonwealth men"—republican reformers in Parliament during the 1720s, especially John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon—on the American Founders. A generation later, Gordon Wood (Mr. Bailyn's student at Harvard) produced "The Radicalism of the American Revolution" (1991), a study of the social and political effects of the Independence.
Saturday, July 26, 2014
WSJ: "Book Review: 'Nature's God' by Matthew Stewart & 'Independence' by Thomas P. Slaughter"
From the Wall Street Journal here. A taste:
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
8 comments:
Against Gregg's advice, I have purchased and will slog through Nature's God. A few years ago I started collecting quotes by scholars who claim that "most of America's founders were deists." I have written a chapter and give a talk that I think, in all modesty, shows this claim to be patently false. I sometimes worry that scholars will stop making it, thus making my chapter/talk less relevant. I presume Stewart makes this claim himself, and he certainly quotes with approval RR Palmer's statement that "most of the leaders of the American Revolution" "were deists" (445) That would come as some surprise to Samuel Adams, John Hancock, Patrick Henry, John Dickinson, and George Washington (to name just five).
The only way one can begin to make a plausible argument along these lines is to adopt a definition of deism that allows for God to intervene in human history (sometimes called Providential Deism or warm deism) and then limit one's claims to "key" founders (usually Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, and Paine). Much of my scholarship over the past two decades centers on expanding the notion of who counts as a founder. Can we include Roger Sherman, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, William Paterson, Elias Boudinot Patrick Henry.... in our discussions please? In a perverse way, I hope to be able to use Stewart's book to make this point. If we are going to count Thomas Young as a founder, surely that opens the door to expanding the constellation of founders from 5-7 to at least 800 (think of the many civic leaders involved in the various conventions at the state and national levels, members of the Continental, Confederation, and First Federal Congresses, etc).
We'll see.
If anyone would like a copy of my little essay that shows that there was perhaps only one deist among American civic leaders in the founding era, please feel free to email me a mhall@georgefox.edu.
Mark
Good. The tactic has been David Barton is BS, leaving "the Founders were deists" as the only man standing.
And of course almost all the Defenders of Historical Truth who've made being David Barton's proctologist their cottage industry are MIA when it comes to debunking the deist bleat.
See also Feser on the corollary, "The Founding was the product of the Enlightenment"
http://www.libertylawsite.org/book-review/perception-is-everything/
Mark,
I look forward to your review. I think the book would be a great foil or jumping off point to argue against "the Founders were Deists" thesis.
Tom Van Dyke writes, The tactic has been David Barton is BS, leaving "the Founders were deists" as the only man standing.
And of course almost all the Defenders of Historical Truth who've made being David Barton's proctologist their cottage industry are MIA when it comes to debunking the deist bleat.
You need to expand your scholars to credible ones. No historian I read argues the strawman you create here.
It's possible for informed readers and scholars to both discern what a fraud David Barton and understand the religiosity of the framers.
So where's the scholarly outcry against this shitty book?
I will humbly note that my book was written precisely to properly "understand the religiosity of the framers" (at least 8 of them) and to demonstrate that there is another option besides David Barton's Christian America notion and leaving the founders as deists as "the only man standing."
Amen. Note how Stewart went after Dreisbach, Hall, and your honorable self.
A version of this false equivalence can be found in [Hall, Dreisbach, & Morrison’s] The Forgotten Founders on Religion and Public Life.”
You pose a threat to the current revisionist hegemony of the "Godless Constitution" bunch. And they play dirty.
Part of the problem is defining the word "founding."
Can we agree that "founding" a nation is not simply a matter of drawing on one's "identity" (i.e., atheist, deist, theist, Christian, etc., whether imposed by historians or by contemporaries themselves) to channel some essence at the time that one voted or wrote a political document? As if, after one performed the significant "deed" or "action," it was then imbued with some timeless substance that becomes impervious to change?
In addition, is there not a pragmatic way of understanding origins by also looking at the actions taken by people after the disputed event, and seeing what people made of that document or idea. For example, was their a certain flexibility of interpretation in the words themselves (as there was in the Declaration and Constitution) to suggest that the people who "founded" the country were hoping for such ambiguity?
Post a Comment