Rowe and Hart on George Washington

Thanks to Brad Hart for creating a Youtube site for this blog. Hopefully some other brave souls will venture into the world of podcasting(I know I won't be joining them but hopefully some of you will).

As most of you already know, Jon Rowe and Brad Hart share many of the same views on the issue of the founding fathers and religion. Well, I just discovered that they BOTH have done Youtube videos on this topic, so I think they deserve the attention (and embarrassment) of having those videos referenced here.

Book Review: America's Jubilee

Andrew Burstein's America's Jubilee: A Generation Remembers the Revolution After 50 Years of Independence is an entertaining and enlightening history of America's 50th anniversary, which was arguably the most festive July 4th our country has ever celebrated. It was on this date -- July 4,1826 -- that cities across America commemorated "America's Jubilee" in a way they had never done before. Parades, songs, dances and parties were held all across the American landscape with such enthusiasm and vigor that virtually every American was caught up in the celebration of this triumphant American milestone. As one female citizen from Pennsylvania stated in a poem published in a local newspaper of the time, this moment was literally saturated in providential passion:

The deeds of our heroes, their courage sublime,
Have long been the pride, and the theme of our story
And their triumphs shall mark the divisions of time,
And be hallow’d as the Epochs of National glory!
On this festival Day,
Our glad homage we’ll pay
To the God of the Pilgrims! who lighted their way,
And ne’er shall his flame on our altars decline,
Till earth shall to chaos her empire resign!

As the poem above suggests, "America's Jubilee" served as a poignant and providential moment in time when a new generation of Americans paused to commemorate their inheritance. Burstein's book is essentially an in depth analysis of how this singular moment in time served to legitimize the providential beliefs of a new generation of Americans who were literally in the grips of a "Second Great Awakening" which in turn helped to redefine the religious landscape of the infant nation. Throughout the book, Burstein focuses on some of the nostalgic moments associated with "America's Jubilee," which caused many Americans to reflect on the deeds of their fathers, all of which invoked a powerful feeling of providential destiny. For example, Burstein makes particular mention of the arrival of Marquis de Lafayette from France, who was greeted with the highest of pomp and circumstance. His arrival marked Lafayette's first return to America since his days as a loyal confidant of General Washington. What is interesting about this event is the fact that Lafayette was awestruck by how quickly and dramatically America had changed in just a short period of time. Lafayette had left America at a time when its infrastructure was underdeveloped, its industry almost non-existent, and its people still acting and thinking like British subjects. Upon his return, Lafayette specifically mentioned how this new generation of Americans had created a unique culture that was unrecognizable from that of their parents. As a result, Lafayette actually believed that the Revolution had failed in that the republican ideals of the founders themselves had not been transmitted to their successors.

Obviously the most remarkable portion of Burstein's book centers on the death of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, both of whom expired on the very day of America's Jubilee. And while most Americans did not learn of the passing of both Jefferson and Adams until a few weeks later, the fact that these two "juggernauts" of the founding died on the 50th anniversary of the DoI became the most dramatic example of American providentialism in the eyes of the citizenry. As if it were a page out of a divine script, Adams and Jefferson left the world together. For the nation, it seemed as though Providence had placed its final stamp of approval on the American experiment. Now America’s future generations would carry the legacy forward. One newspaper of the time captured this sense of divine inheritance by quoting Jefferson who stated in a letter to Adams:

We will have our follies without doubt. Some one or more of them will always be afloat. But ours will be the follies of enthusiasm, not bigotry…Bigotry is the disease of ignorance, of morbid minds; enthusiasm of the free and buoyant. Education and free discussion are the antidotes of both. We are destined to be a barrier against the returns of ignorance and barbarism. Old Europe will have to lean on our shoulders and hobble along by our side, under the monkish trammels of priests and kings.

And as Burstein effectively points out, certainly this sentiment of divine intervention in America's future was virtually secured thanks to the "timely" deaths of Jefferson and Adams.

And while Burstien's analysis of "America's Jubilee" does serve to illustrate many of the apparent differences between the generation of the founding and that of their offspring, the author does seem to fall short in his analysis of early 19th century America. To be certain, America did change from its first generation to the second, but the author's overall suggestion that the legacy of the founders was lost is problematic at best. Burstein does not provide any evidence that the "new generation" of Americans had departed from the legacy of the founders. In fact, quite the opposite is true. The simple fact that America's Jubilee was celebrated with such gusto serves to illustrate the fact that the majority of the American citizenry had the founding legacy fixed in their minds and hearts. In addition, Burstein's thesis seems to go against that of historian Joyce Appleby, who in her book Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans actually argues the opposite of Burstein's overall thesis -- much more convincingly mind you.

And though the book tends to be a bit one-sided, Burstein's analysis of "America's Jubilee" is both captivating and enlightening. I'm amazed that it hasn't received more attention by the historical community, especially when we consider just how poignant this particular moment in time was for so many Americans.

Overall Grade: B+

Tyranny, Anti-Catholicism, and the Birth of a Country

Anti-Catholicism has a long and storied history going back around 500 years to the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. Following Henry VII's split with Rome in 1534, anti-Catholic bias was elevated from being an articulated position within the Church to an institutionalized bias within the British government. This was codified with the Act of Supremacy, which replaced the Pope as the head of the Church with the English Crown.

The following centuries would be rife with Catholic/Protestant conflicts within England and, more importantly, between England and France. The Protestant Church, and English Protestants, would refer to the Catholic church as the Whore of Babylon, the Pope as the anti-Christ, and frequently use the word tyranny in association with Catholic rule.

This is very important to the founding of America, as this bias was imported with the colonists. This is evidenced through a number of early laws in multiple colonies that would forbid Catholic settlers, forbid Catholics from holding office, etc. This would eventually change with the passage of Religious Toleration laws, however suspicion towards Papists
would continue to bubble beneath the surface well into the 20th Century.

With Catholicism and the French inextricably mixed, the words tyranny, liberty, virtue, vice, etc. were commonly used in both political and theological arenas.

It is perhaps fortuitous for the birth of the United States that the Seven Years War occurred when it did. Religious leaders in the colonies had little difficulty getting their congregations to support the "liberty protecting" British against the "tyrannical" French. Preachers of the day used such strong language and imagery that tyranny became associated with anything and anyone that threatened the colonists way of life.

Within 2 years of the end of the war, the Stamp Act was passed. With the memories of the bloodshed still fresh in the colonists minds, it wasn't too much of a stretch for the religious leaders to subtly shift the target of who the tyrant was from the Catholic French and their Pope to the English Crown. I believe that this, along with Mayhew's Discourse, made revolution against their mother country a little more palatable to the colonists.

In essence, one could come to the conclusion that one of the major factors in the birth of the United States was the rabid anti-Catholic bias imported here by the colonists.

McGrath on "Christian Nation Irony"

James F. McGrath, Associate Professor of Religion at Butler University, Indianapolis, nails the problem with the "Christian Nation" thesis as articulated by Barton, Marshall, Federer, et al.:

It seems unlikely that at any point in the past the vast majority of inhabitants of the United States were devout Christians with a personal faith, as opposed to nominal Christians for whom their Christianity consisted largely of a "tribal identity" including churchgoing and assenting to some doctrinal beliefs and moral precepts.

Does it not seem ironic, then, that the notion of American having once been a "Christian nation", and nostalgia for that bygone golden age, is found largely among Evangelicals, those very Christians who emphasize the need for a personal faith, and the inadequacy of a Christianity that consists merely of church attendance, denominational affiliation, or even moral living?

Am I missing something? Why would the very Christians who deny the adequacy of such nominal Christianity today, depict its heyday as a sort of golden age for American Christianity?

That's the problem: There was no Golden Age. Arguably the evangelical view of the Bible teaches there never will be a Golden Age until Christ returns as their faith is a "narrow path." Roger Williams, ironically, understood this and in doing so was one of the first Christian political leaders to reject the "Christian Nation" thesis and, consequently, promote "religious liberty."

Williams was clear, it is only by rejecting that a nation is "Christian" in a civil, governmental, covenant sense (in the sense that the Puritans like John Winthrop articulated and tried to put into action) that government could recognize religious liberty. And key to Williams' assertion was the inevitable existence of large numbers (perhaps, probably a strong majority!) of "unregenerate" (i.e., nominal Christians) existing in any nation, even those whose population consider themselves "Christian." The inevitable existence of large numbers of unregenerate everywhere before Christ's return makes the idea of a "Christian Nation" blasphemous.

Charles Chauncy on Reason, Revelation and Doctrine

The Rev. Charles Chauncy was one of the most influential preachers of the revolutionary era. He was an explicit theological enemy of Jonathan Edward's "Great Awakening." Contrary to what you might have heard, arguably it was ANTI-Great Awakening thought that theologically drove the American Revolution. You can read one of Chauncy's most notable pro-revolutionary sermons here.

Chauncy claimed he could use Sola Scriptura to prove the falsity of the doctrines of original sin, the trinity and eternal damnation. That puts him in the "heretic," arguably "not Christian" box, from the perspective of the "orthodox." Gregg Frazer's PhD thesis has a lengthy write up on Chauncy that concludes his theology was "not Christian."

Chauncy's method was interesting. He embraced "reason" along with "revelation." Indeed he criticized the "Great Awakeners" for not being "reasonable" enough when he noted:

But in nothing does the enthusiasm of these persons discover itself more, than in the disregard they express to the dictates of reason.

He claimed he could show from the Bible alone that it did not teach the aforementioned orthodox doctrines. Chauncy would admit, though, that it was his own "reasoned interpretation" of the Bible that rejected these doctrines.

And this nuance sheds light on a dispute about Gregg Frazer's thesis occurring in the commentary at American Creation. Gregg's thesis argued the key Founders and patriotic preachers believed that, though reason and revelation generally agreed with one another and that some, much, but not all of the Bible was legitimately revealed, when the two appeared to conflict they resolved the conflict in favor of reason, not revelation. Hence reason trumped revelation. You certainly get this from Jefferson, J. Adams, and Franklin. But, as my friend Tom Van Dyke argues, those three said these things privately and regarding the others, especially in their public addresses, you don't see them claiming the Bible is fallible, that reason trumps its errors, etc.

Van Dyke is right in the sense that publicly the key FFs and the patriotic preachers like Chauncy, Jonathan Mayhew, Samuel West and many others, didn't go around calling the Bible errant and saying that human reason trumps it. It might not be what they SAID; but it's arguably what they DID. And like the key Founders, it's perhaps/probably what the patriotic preachers PRIVATELY thought.

On the surface they appeared to preach that reason and revelation agreed, that we must have a "reasoned" interpretation of the Bible because they same God who authored the Bible also authored NATURE (what man discovered from reason alone). But when the two appeared to conflict, they followed nature and made the Bible "fit" with the findings of man's reason.

I think one could argue that this is exactly how Chauncy, Mayhew and West all handled the Trinity, Eternal Damnation and Romans 13. Man's REASON, discovering NATURE, found (among other things) that 1) God is unitary, not Triune, 2) a benevolent God would not damn anyone to Hell for eternity, and 3) men have a right to rebel against tyrants. With that already settled, they went back and made their scriptural case for all three positions.

You can read Chauncy doing this in his classic The Mystery Hid From Ages and Generations which was his purported biblical case against eternal damnation. Perhaps in a later post we will read from its quotations and discuss whether it really is the Bible that teaches against eternal damnation or "reason" superseding certain parts of the Bible to get to that result.

Is There an American Mind?

By Allen C. Guelzo

[And has it changed? In his waning days, Thomas Jefferson said the Declaration of Independence "was intended to be an expression of the American mind." Mr. Guelzo gives a brief but very important history of "the American mind," excerpted here. The full essay can and should be read in its entirety, natch.---TVD]

Do Americans have minds?

Of course not. “The greater part of the public, and a greater part even of the intelligent and alert public, is simply non-intellectual,” declared Richard Hofstadter in his bluntly titled Anti-intellectualism in American Life in 1963. Of course not, agreed Daniel Boorstin, Hofstadter’s contemporary and (in many ways) nemesis. “When,” Boorstin asked, “has a culture owed so little to its few ‘great’ minds or its few hereditarily fortunate men and women?” Of course not, chortled Henry Louis Mencken, the king of the debunkers, in the 1920s. Precisely because America was the great engine of democracy, it was also the ruthless engine of populism, the land of what Mencken snarlingly called “the booboisie,” “boobus Americanus,” or the “boobocracy.”

We could, in fact, create quite a long list of testimonies about American mindlessness, and it would include Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Jackson Turner, James Fenimore Cooper, and Alexis de Tocqueville (who was dismayed to find that “there is no country in the civilized world” with “fewer great artists, illustrious poets, and celebrated writers”).

“When foreigners accuse us of extraordinary love for gain, and of practical materialism, they fail to see how largely we are a nation of idealists,” complained the Harvard philosopher Josiah Royce in 1897. We wouldn’t know this, however, if we judged by the way the history of American ideas is usually taught. Take, as a recent instance, William Goetzmann’s new Beyond the Revolution: A History of American Thought from Paine to Pragmatism (Basic, 480 pp., $35).

The America of Tom Paine “was a country of diversity and vastness,” but also of “vagueness.” This “vagueness” Goetzmann assumes to be a virtue in its own right, since it permitted Americans “to constantly redefine themselves” for a century after Paine “in search of an ideal — freedom.” At last, in the 1890s, Americans invented Pragmatism, which turned this incessant reinvention into a philosophy of its own, whose chief accomplishment was to abolish any “moral guides” on reinvention. The chief accomplishment of American thought is thus to free itself — from thought.

This is not entirely Goetzmann’s fault, since Goetzmann is only following what I’ll call, for simplicity’s sake, the “Harvard Narrative” of American intellectual history, a pattern laid down since the 1920s...The Harvard Narrative proceeds like this: Begin with the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay in the 1630s. Touch, if you like, on the fact that these Puritans possessed a university-trained leadership and organized themselves around a university-trained clergy, sunk deeply in theology and medieval scholasticism. But be sure to dismiss this as little more than some very dense holy-rolling, and simply note in passing that the Puritans founded Harvard College only six years after settling Boston.

Move as quickly as decency permits to Jonathan Edwards. Not that Edwards is all that interesting as a thinker, but treat him as undoubtedly the last example of whatever thinking the Puritans did. Dwell at length on his role as a hell-fire preacher during the Great Awakening of the 1740s. But dwell even more on the fact that the Awakening died out by 1742, and that Edwards was fired from his job as pastor of his church in 1750 and died just as he was assuming the presidency of Princeton in 1758. Let him stand as a sign of how badly America treats its thinkers, but somehow simultaneously make him out to be not much of a thinker at all.

This is the last time you will actually need to worry about ideas in this history of American ideas, because you are now ready for an introduction to Benjamin Franklin, the model American and proto-Pragmatist — practical, commonsensical, businesslike, and born with an eye to the main chance. There is room, within the Harvard Narrative, to talk a little bit about the ideology of the American Revolutionaries —--but let Franklin stay at front stage. Jump from there to Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalists, a few New England Renaissance novelists (Melville, Hawthorne), and then you’re prepared to herald the arrival of William James and John Dewey, and the triumph of Pragmatism as the first, true, and only American philosophy — precisely because it is a philosophy that sees no intrinsic use for ideas, and uses them only as instruments for obtaining results.

Goetzmann’s Beyond the Revolution is actually content to end with Pragmatism, as though Game Over had popped up on the screen sometime in the mid-1890s. The rest, we can assume, is just details. Within this narrative, there are really only two messages: how we escaped the influence of religion, and why all American intellectual roads lead to Pragmatism.

There is, however, a difficulty with the Harvard Narrative...the more you look at it, the more apples and oranges get packed into the same crate. Notice that these writers represent different and largely incompatible genres. Edwards’s collected writings, in the modern Yale edition, run to 26 volumes, and span everything from parish sermons to full-fledged treatises on ethics. Franklin’s only philosophical work was a youthful essay on free will; it was his Experiments and Observations on Electricity in 1751 that made him world-famous. Emerson never wrote a book longer than 45 pages...and earned most of his celebrity as a popular lecturer.

...

[The Harvard Narrative] must not know, or seem to know, that between the day the Puritans founded Harvard and the day Edwards began preaching stretches an entire century in which New Englanders wrestled mightily with the impact on the intellectual world of Cartesian epistemology and Newtonian science; that Edwards shaped the creation of two generations of independent preachers and theological thinkers who applied his creative adaptations of Descartes and Newton to questions of personal identity, knowledge, and religion; that Franklin’s adopted home of Philadelphia belonged — at least intellectually — not to Franklin but to the Enlightenment; and that this latter movement, instead of standing aloof from the religious concerns of evangelical Awakeners like Edwards, actually incorporated them, and produced a generous flowering of writing on what 18th-century philosophes called “moral philosophy,” with its roots in the Scottish Enlightenment and its headquarters in Philadelphia.

The moral-philosophy tradition was a speculative mix of natural-law ethics with overtones of Christian orthodoxy minimal enough to prevent any Jeffersonian vigilantes from decrying it as a stalking horse for public religion. And it produced a counterpart in political theory in the ideology of the American Whig party, represented by Henry Carey, Francis Wayland, and Abraham Lincoln. Wayland’s Elements of Moral Science (1835) sold 40,000 copies in its first 15 years and 100,000 during its life in print. By contrast with Wayland, Emerson and the Transcendentalists were Romantic lightweights.

I mean “Romantic” in a very specific sense, too. Puritanism, and its renewal by Edwards in the 1740s, opposed much of what the Enlightenment stood for. Puritans and Edwardseans were people of religious faith, and accepted certain truths about God and the world as they were described in the Bible; and many of those truths were sorted out and shaped by the theology of John Calvin, and by the experience of religious individualism and moral rigor laid down by the first Puritan generation. But Puritanism had more flex in it than we often think, and even Edwards’s fiery evangelicalism had an overlap with the Enlightenment in its respect for reason and universal moral principles. Puritanism and the Enlightenment represent the “two souls” of American intellectual history, but they were souls that could inhabit the same body without always inducing schizophrenia.


The Enlightenment believed that all real questions had real answers, and that these answers were knowable and universally compatible with one another. The Romantics disagreed: Reason was a limited and broken tool and did not reveal half of what it claimed to reveal about the world; people wanted to be guided by passion rather than reason; and what appeared true to some people was not necessarily true for others or other cultures. Consequently, Emerson is really linked not to Franklin or to Pragmatism, but to the European Romantics — to the later Kant, to Hegel and Chateaubriand.

However, the Harvard Narrative is right on at least one point, and that is the revolutionary upthrust of Pragmatism at Harvard after the Civil War. Nothing could represent a more dramatic intellectual break with the moral philosophers’ pursuit of truth, hard-wired into the natural order of things, than Pragmatism. The architects of Pragmatism — Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and (to a lesser degree) Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. — shrank in horror from the carnage of the Civil War, convinced that the pursuit of truth was what turned men into absolutists and sent them into battle with each other.

Peirce and James rejected the idea that truth was a set of beliefs or propositions that corresponded to an eternal natural order of right and wrong. Truth, by their reckoning, was what gave people satisfaction, irrespective of what form it took. Truth was, to borrow a term from Kant, pragmatic. And nothing was worth calling truth, James announced, unless it offered “a doctrine of relief.”

It was John Dewey, however, who transformed Pragmatism from a sort of philosophical therapy into a grand scheme of educational and social reconstruction. Dewey’s demand for “Reconstruction in Society” had no use for religion or any other form of absolute truth. What mattered was the creation of a pragmatic society in which everyone enjoyed fairness, worried only about solving immediate problems by generally agreed means, and got along happily — like a gigantic but carefully managed school recess.

Not intellectual questions, but social solutions, were of genuine interest to Pragmatism. Dewey’s social Pragmatism, in turn, appealed deeply to a new industrial class of white-collar managers and bureaucrats, from Woodrow Wilson to Frederick Winslow Taylor (the first industrial “efficiency expert”). These were the unsmiling, untheoretical problem-solvers who formed the backbone of turn-of-the-century Progressive politics, and they became the grandfathers of the New Deal and the Great Society.

Grant the fundamental premises of Pragmatism — that no truth exists apart from satisfaction, that no nation or principle is worth dying for, and that all human inequities are merely problems awaiting the application of intelligence — and they will burn a swath of anti-intellectualism so wide no American mind worth noticing will ever seem to have existed.

Pragmatism is, so to speak, the anti-intellectualism of the philosophers, and those who swallowed it were unwittingly but effectively drinking their own hemlock.

In the process, Progressives and Pragmatists alike missed the boat on two developments in the later 20th century that none of the Pragmatists could have foreseen: 1) the rise of a neo-orthodox religious critique (especially as championed by Reinhold Niebuhr in the 1950s) and the persistence of the seriousness with which theology was conducted as an intellectual enterprise in America; and 2) the emergence, in violent fashion, of the New Left in the 1960s. Both were a puzzle to Pragmatists, because there was no reason they could see for the dogmatic outlook behind both even to exist.

These two survivals, desperately unalike in all respects except the single conviction that there is an unmistakable pattern written into human experience and history, suggest that the moral philosophers’ instinct was truer than Pragmatism ever imagined, and that Americans want more from ideas than the Pragmatic reassurance that ideas are merely tools for experimentation.

Nor has the natural-law core of the moral-philosophy tradition ever faded entirely from the American intellectual scene. How could it? When Jefferson asserted that “we hold these truths to be self-evident,” he assumed that not only were there truths, but that everyone was compelled to acknowledge their existence.

Lincoln believed that the American order was founded on a “proposition” — not an experience, and certainly not on race, blood, ethnicity, or any of the other Romantic irrationalities. (Lincoln is frequently described as a “pragmatist”; but using the term this way makes it into little more than a synonym for “practical.” Strictly speaking, Lincoln was anything but a Pragmatist. He denounced slavery as ethically wrong, as a violation of natural law and natural theology — and would admit to no compromise with, and no scaling back of, his Emancipation Proclamation.)

The master narrative of Pragmatism would have us believe that all Americans are Pragmatists, and always have been; the history of American ideas---the real history ---tells us something very different. And that’s why the history of America in the Age of Obama, and beyond, will continue to be a clash of ideas.

Mr. Guelzo is the Henry R. Luce professor of the Civil War era at Gettysburg College.

The Use of Reason In America's Founding Era Political Pulpits

I want to point out something else about the dialog that is occuring in the American creation comments section among me, Tom Van Dyke and Gregg Frazer. We are walking in the shoes of larger figures. Gregg and I are more influenced by the followers of Leo Strauss, especially the East Coast Straussians, like Michael Zuckert, Thomas Pangle and Walter Berns. Though Gregg and I play a bit more cautious with "reading in" secret atheism to Locke. Gregg's thesis, after all, states theistic rationalism NOT atheistic rationalism is the political theology of America.

Tom, on the other hand is more influenced by figures like Eric Voegelin and Brian Teirney. The Strauss-Zuckert-Pangle view sees American political theology as something more modern. The Voegelin-Teirney view sees American political theology as something that fits more within the classical-Christian natural law.

A big issue of contention is how compatible are Aristotelian notions of natural law with the Bible/Christianity. If one's religious tradition -- Protestant Sola Scriptura -- cares little for natural law as a supplement to the Bible, indeed if one, like Francis Schaeffer sees a danger in it, then the American Founding political theology, properly understood, should not speak to you.

And ironically the Christian America crowd tends to be Sola-Scriptura Protestants who care little for the natural law discovered by reason. This is one reason why they misunderstand "the laws of Nature and Nature's God" for what's shorthand for the Bible. There is very little exegesis on David Barton's Wallbuilders on natural law, how it has its antecedents in Aristotle, was incorporated into Christdendom by Aquinas and then incorporated into Protestantism by thinkers like Hooker, and that fundamentally it is what man discovers from reason, even if ultimately it must conform to what's written in the Bible.

But that -- whether natural law discovered by reason -- really is suited to conform to what's written in the Bible is also central to this debate. Aquinas used natural law as a supplement to the Bible and said he made it conform to scripture. However, some more modern natural lawyers (like Jefferson, J. Adams, Franklin, some of the patriotic preachers) used the Bible as a supplement to man's reason, and ultimately had man's natural reason supersede scripture (especially Romans 13).

So these are the central points in the dialog, when the Founders invoked a God given substantive natural law as discovered by reason, 1) was it something more classical-Christian or more modern? And 2) is the classical concept of natural law as a supplement to the Bible necessary or even consistent with biblical Christianity or a perversion of Christianity by Aquinas?

As Allan Bloom wrote in The Closing of the American Mind, “Aristotle…was used as an authority almost on a level with the Church Fathers and was assimilated to them. This was, of course, an abuse of Aristotle, who thought that authority is the contrary of philosophy….The essence of philosophy is the abandonment of all authority in favor of individual human reason.” pp. 252-3.

And with that I am going to reproduce some of Gregg Frazer's summary of the very natural law/natural rights oriented political sermons of the American Founding. Most of those political sermons can be found here:

...[T]here are two ways of looking at the question of "reason over revelation"....

One is the idea that one's reason should take priority over the CONCEPT of revelation.

The other is that one's reason should take priority over the CONTENT of revelation.

It is my contention that we find both of these in the key Founders and in the preachers who supplied them with theological cover for the Revolution.

A few examples of reason over the CONCEPT of revelation:
a) Jefferson tells his nephew: "Your own reason is the ONLY oracle given you by heaven" and "Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal EVERY fact, EVERY opinion."
b) Adams said that he would believe what his reason told him over DIRECT REVELATION from God and that when reason is clear, "no subsequent revelation, supported by prophecies or miracles, can supersede it."
c) Samuel Cooke said that men "can be subjected to NO human restrictions which are not founded in reason" [inc. those given by revelation] and he equated "the voice of nature" with "the voice of God [revelation]."
d) Samuel West said: "whatever right reason requires as necessary to be done is AS MUCH the will and law of God AS THOUGH IT WERE ENJOINED US BY AN IMMEDIATE REVELATION FROM HEAVEN."
e) John Tucker said of his view of government: "It is the voice of reason, which may be said to be the voice of God [revelation]."
f) Gad Hitchcock denuded Romans 13 of its supernaturally revealed status by referring to the passage as Paul's "rational point of view."
g) Samuel Cooper made conformity to reason the test of the validity of Scripture. He went on to say that his were "the principles ... which reason and scripture will forever sanctify;" but his references were to Sidney, Locke, and the atheist Voltaire -- not to Moses, Paul, and Jesus.

And, of course, Jefferson famously took a pair of scissors to the New Testament and removed whole sections which he, by his reason, had determined were not revelation at all and referred to the rest of the New Testament other than the Gospels as a "dunghill."

How America Is and Is NOT a "Protestant Nation"

A later post will discuss how America is and is not a Catholic Nation

My friends Gregg Frazer and Tom Van Dyke (and some others) are heatedly debating in the comments section at American Creation how to properly understand American political theology. In a nutshell Gregg has termed American political theology "theistic rationalism," and Tom doesn't like the way that term fails to incorporate "Judeo-Christianity." Gregg's thesis argues "Protestant Christianity" makes up one of three components of "theistic rationalism," (the others being Deism and natural religion) but "theistic rationalism" is still not "Christianity." It is also not "Deism," but something in between Christianity and Deism.

So this post explains how America could be accurately termed a "Protestant Nation," but not necessarily a "Christian Nation," and why it might be right to recognize America's Protestant political theological roots, without terming those roots "Christian."

Terms -- what they mean, and how the user and the listener understand them -- might confuse, if not properly explicated, but rather used in vague generalities. The American Founders, by the way, tended purposefully to not explicate theological terms in their public God talk (and private correspondence with non-theologically like minded figures), because, as non-orthodox theists, they differed, theologically, PROFOUNDLY and irreconcilably with the "orthodox" whose "consent" to their liberal democratic-republican project they needed to procure. Washington for instance, invariably spoke in vague theological terms when he addressed the orthodox ministers who adored him and whom he respected.

And that confusion -- where the "orthodox" think the Founders meant what they wanted them to mean, but didn't -- persists to this day (in large part because of the key Founders' clever way of operating and the hagiographic remake of the FFs by pietist myth-makers like Mason Weems -- figures like David Barton and Peter Marshall are the Parson Weemses of the present era).

For instance, one of the "Christian Nation" crowd's favorite quotations is from John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, 28 June, 1813:

The general principles on which the fathers achieved independence, were...the general principles of Christianity, in which all those sects were united, and the general principles of English and American liberty, in which all those young men united, and which had united all parties in America, in majorities sufficient to assert and maintain her independence.

Now, without understanding the CONTEXT of said quotation one might conclude "Christianity" meant things like infallibility of the Bible, original sin, trinity, incarnation, atonement, eternal damnation. But, one would be wrong as both Jefferson and Adams (especially in that year 1813 when their heterodoxy was most pronounced!) rejected every one of those tenets. And the context of said letter suggests Adams meant clearly some *other* theological system:

Who composed that army of fine young fellows that was then before my eyes? There were among them Roman Catholics, English Episcopalians, Scotch and American Presbyterians, Methodists, Moravians, Anabaptists, German Lutherans, German Calvinists, Universalists, Arians, Priestleyans, Socinians, Independents, Congregationalists, Horse Protestants, and House Protestants,2 Deists and Atheists, and Protestants “qui ne croyent rien.” [Protestants who believe in nothing---JR.] Very few, however, of several of these species; nevertheless, all educated in the general principles of Christianity, and the general principles of English and American liberty.

Not just theological unitarians and universalists, but even deists and atheists, Adams states were united under this "Christian" theological system. What Adams means by "Christianity" here seems not unlike his definition to Samuel Miller, July 8, 1820 where he wrote:

“I believe with Justin Martyr, that all good men are Christians, and I believe there have been, and are, good men in all nations, sincere and conscientious.”

In other words, if an atheist was a good person, he was a "Christian." This is not what the followers of David Barton, Peter Marshall and others think when they hear that quote plucked from context. Likewise when they hear or argue America was founded to be a "Christian Nation," "Judeo-Christian Nation," or "Protestant Christian Nation" they likely understand or mean something else.

To them "Protestant Christianity" means Sola-Scriptura, the Bible as the inerrant, infallible word of God, and orthodox doctrines from original sin, to the Trinity to eternal damnation. In this sense Protestant Christianity is that lowest common denominator between Luther and Calvin. [For evidence of this, see the comments section of this post, which includes a comment by John Lofton.]

But this is precisely NOT how America was founded as a "Protestant Nation" in a political-theological sense. Rather, America's Protestant political-theological foundations relate to the following: The word "Protestant" literally means to "protest," or "dissent." As it applies to political-theology, American Protestantism means a private right to religious conscience. In this sense the individual not only has a private right to decide for himself on matters of Trinity and eternal damnation, but also which parts of the Bible are valid.

In this sense, America was founded, politically, to be a "Protestant Nation," with Thomas Jefferson the quintessential American (political) Protestant. Jefferson certainly thought of himself as a "Protestant Christian," and was a lifelong member of the Anglican-Episcopal club. He also devoutly believed in an active personal God. However, his "Protestantism" led him to reject, not just (his words) "[t]he immaculate conception of Jesus, his deification, the creation of the world by him, his miraculous powers, his resurrection and visible ascension, his corporeal presence in the Eucharist, the Trinity; original sin, atonement, regeneration, election, orders of Hierarchy, &c.," but also large parts of the Bible as valid revelation.

So, as Jefferson illustrates, it's possible to be a Protestant, an Anglican, but arguably not a "Christian." One could argue Jefferson's rejection of the infallibility of the Bible did in his "Christianity." But even if we accept Sola-Scriptura, American political Protestantism still might not qualify as "Christian."

Case in point, another monumental influence on the American Founding politics: Rev. Charles Chauncy. As historian and President of Wakeforest University Nathan Hatch described Chauncy:

Charles Chauncy, pastor of Boston’s First Church for sixty years (1727-1787), is the most prominent example of an exclusive appeal to Biblical authority in order to unravel theological orthodoxy. Chauncy was persuaded to emphasize Bible study by reading the works of English divines, such as Samuel Clarke’s The Scripture-Doctrine of the Trinity (London, 1712) and John Taylor’s The Scripture-Doctrine of Original Sin (London, 1740). Both authors used a “free, impartial and diligent” method of examining Scripture to JETTISON, respectively, the doctrines of the Trinity and of Original Sin. [8]

During the 1750s, after the Great Awakening, Charles Chauncy spent seven years engaged in the approach to Bible study expounded by these English authors. In the spring of 1754 he wrote to a friend,

“I have made the Scriptures my sole study for about two years; and I think I have attained to a clearer understanding of them than I ever had before.”

His studies led him to draft a lengthy manuscript in which he REJECTED the idea of eternal punishment and embraced universalism....He explained to Ezra Stiles, “The whole is written from the Scripture account of the thing and not from any human scheme.” This unorthodox biblicist would have been gratified indeed by the reaction of one minister who, finding the book’s arguments convincing, wrote,

“He has placed many texts and passages of Scripture in a light altogether new to me, and I cannot help thinking his system not only rational, but Scriptural.” [9]

So as it turns out, America's Protestant political-theological foundations mean a fundamental right to private judgment in matters of religious conscience. This political theology teaches the right to religious judgment is so private and individualized, that matters such as original sin, trinity, eternal damnation, and which parts of the Bible are valid are consigned to the realm of the private conscience and are driven from politics; they play no part in America's political-theological foundation.

The question then remains is such a Protestant system that posits Providence and a special place for Jesus, but refuses to take a position on original sin, the Trinity, Jesus as the only way to God, eternal damnation, and the infallibility of the Bible, "Christian"?

How we answer the question determines whether America's Founding political theology is aptly termed "Christian" or not. If not, we could say America had a "Protestant" but not a "Christian" founding.

The "Christian Nation" is Getting Desperate

and their nonsense is
reaching a crescendo

This past week, Mike Huckabee, David Barton, Lou Engle, Oliver North, and others joined Newt Gingrich's Rediscovering God in America movement in Virginia Beach. The result: a convoluted, disorganized and messy presentation to a mass of desperate people who are attempting to cling to whatever fragment of "Christian Nation" nonsense they can find. And make no mistake about it, their message is getting old, watered down, boring and predictable. Here are just a few examples:

Mike Huckabee:
"The notion that we are just one of many among equals is nonsense. The United States is a blessed nation and our victory over the British empire was a miracle from God's hand."

The same kind of miracle, he said, led California voters to approve Proposition 8, which overturned a state law legalizing same-sex marriages.

Voters "did it because some things are right and some things are wrong and they had to make a stand."

Newt Gingrich:

—We are in a period when we are surrounded by paganism. And paganism is on offence and that's why our first great challenge is spiritual.

—Reignite in people an understanding that the heart of your life is subordination to God, the heart of your life is seeking God's will and that all of us are weak and vulnerable, all of us make mistakes, but that all are welcomed by a loving God.

—Reach out to everybody in the country who is not yet saved and...help them understand the spiritual basis of a creator-endowed society.

—The beginning of wisdom and virtue is a recognition of our subordination to God, and to the fact that a life without God is a life so empty that even drugs and alcohol and other things cannot fill it.

—This is a country in hunger for another Great Awakening, a wave of belief which has again and again swept this country and fundamentally changed us.

And here is Newt Gingrich at the John Locke Foundation (am I the only one who finds irony in that):


And here is Lou Engle "blessing" Newt Gingrich (one can only wonder if he would do the same for Hillary Clinton, etc.):


Dr. John Fea had some very interesting things to say on this event over at his blog. Here are a few highlights:

Huckabee: "The notion that we are just one of many among equals is nonsense," Huckabee said. The United States is a "blessed" nation, he said, calling American revolutionaries' defeat of the British empire "a miracle from God's hand." (This is a quote from the Pilot reporter). This is the kind of providential history that worries me. Huckabee is echoing the earliest New England settlers who believed that the Massachusetts Bay Colony was God's chosen people--a new Israel. As Nicholas Guyott has shown in his study of "Providence" in early American history, the notion that America is doing the will of God in the world has gotten us into trouble before. Was the American victory over the British a miracle? It seems to me that we can be more certain in explaining the American victory over Britain in ways other than proclaiming it as some kind of supernatural intervention that defied the laws of nature.

Gingrich: I am not a citizen of the world, I am a citizen of the United States because only in the United States does citizenship start with our creator." First, by claiming that he is not a "citizen of the world" (a clear swipe at Obama's recent speech in Cairo) Gingrich violates his newfound Catholic faith. Catholic social teaching, at least the version put forth by Vincent Rougeau in his recent Christians in the American Empire, suggests that all human beings have solidarity with all other humans based upon the fact that they are created beings who share a common humanity. Catholic solidarity implies, in part, that one's loyalty should be primarily to the entire human race and not a particular nation-state. Rougeau argues that Christian belief in the solidarity of all human beings means that national favoritism is "difficult to justify on moral terms." The nation-state is not divinely ordained. Loyalty to the state should be based on whether or not the state is promoting human dignity and the common good. Moreover, what does Gingrich mean by the idea that "citizenship" starts with "our creator?" The last I checked I do not think that American citizenship requires belief in a creator God.

Gingrich may have found religion, but he has yet to come to grips with the ways his newfound Catholic faith might force him to change his Republican/Religious Right talking points. During the 2008 campaign, Huckabee seemed to show promise, through his populist message, of articulating a Christian-informed politics. But he never did quite separate himself from the error-laden "God and Country" approach to the American past that has become a staple of the Religious Right.

Ben Franklin: Dirty Old Man [But a pious one...]

During his service to the Continental Congress as a member of the delegation to Paris, Ben Franklin became quite smitten with his neighbor's wife, a certain Madame Brillon de Jouy, née Anne-Louise Boivin d'Hardancourt, and they exchanged over 100 letters.

She was quite a babe, early thirties, he nearly seventy. A very religious gal, and Ben's own deep religiosity in reply is still stunning:

"People commonly speak of Ten Commandments. I
have been taught that there are twelve. The first was in-
crease & multiply & replenish the earth. The twelfth is,
A new Commandment I give unto you, that you love one
another. It seems to me that they are a little misplaced, And
that the last should have been the first.

"However I never made any difficulty about that, but was always
willing to obey them both whenever I had an opportunity. Pray
tell me my dear Casuist, whether my keeping religiously these two
commandments tho' not in the Decalogue, may not be accepted
in Compensation for my breaking so often one of the
ten I mean that which forbids Coveting my neighbour's wife,
and which I confess I break constantly God forgive me, as
often as I see or think of my lovely Confessor, and I am
afraid I should never be able to repent of the Sin even if I
had the full Possession of her.

"And forgive me, as often as I see or think of my lovely Confessor: And I am afraid I should never be able to repent of the Sin, even if I had the full Possession of her. And now I am consulting you upon a Case of Conscience, I will mention the Opinion of a certain Father of the Church, which I find myself willing to adopt, tho’ I am not sure it is orthodox. It is this, That the most effectual Way to get rid of a certain Temptation, is, as often as it returns, to comply with and Satisfy it. Pray instruct me how far, I may venture to practice upon this Principle?"

And after Madame Brillon departs Paris, the forlorn Franklin confesses another past Decalogue violation:

"I often pass before your house. It wears a desolate
look to me. Heretofore I have broken the commandments
in coveting it along with my neighbor's wife. Now I do
not covet it. Thus I am less the sinner. But with regard
to the wife, I always find these commandments very
inconvenient, and I am sorry that we are cautioned to practise
them. Should you in your travels find yourself at the home
of St. Peter [The Pope, at the Vatican---Ed.], ask him to recall them, as intended only for the Jews, and as too irksome for good Christians."

Clearly, Franklin considered himself a good Christian. Sort of. Well, not really, but you can see how the Commandments tugged at his conscience.

Next: Franklin's "On Breaking the seventh commandment and wind."

A Problem With Sam Adams Historiography?

A Fundamental Error
in the "Key Founders" Argument

Here at American Creation one of the central topics of conversation centers around the role that the "key founders" had in establishing the American republic. Usually this conversation focuses on five or six "big guns" of the founding era -- Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, John Adams, and sometimes Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Paine -- whose contributions to the American Revolution, Constitution, etc. are considered to be of greater value or influence than others. And while it is true that the contributions of some founders were greater than others -- who would be silly enough suggest that someone like John Rutledge was as important to the American Revolution as George Washington -- I often find myself being somewhat uncomfortable with the term "key founders." After all, what constitutes someone becoming a "key" founder? What criteria do we use when selecting individuals for this ultra-exclusive classification? For example, could a woman ever be considered a "key" founder? Did not Abigail Adams play a pivotal role in supporting John through the ups and downs of his political career? And what of the many influential and prominent founders who supported revolution but rejected the Constitution? Has their legacy been tainted in some way for being on the "wrong side" of history?

Of course the answer to these questions are complex to say the least. After all, one could easily argue -- without being sexist mind you -- that women had virtually no role in the founding of America. There were no women present at the Continental Congress/Constitutional Convention, nor were women allowed to vote/run for office in the early years of the infant American nation. In addition, one could also logically conclude that those who supported revolution but rejected the Constitution -- Patrick Henry comes to mind -- are of somewhat lesser importance due to the simple fact that their beliefs were overshadowed by those of the "key" founders. Of course this should not suggest that the contributions of women or those who opposed the Constitution are irrelevant, but it does illustrate the fact that some "key" individuals did play a greater role than others.

With that said, I believe that many historians/students of early America/amateur historians/whatever else you wanna call them, are oftentimes quite discriminatory in their selection of "key" founders. It is almost always the case that these "key" founders are men of elite status who embraced the Revolution, accepted the Constitution, and, for the purposes of our blog, were at least ambiguous in their devotion to the Christian religion. For example, Gordon Wood, who the majority of readers on this blog consider to be the finest historian of early America, only mentions seven founders -- Washington, John Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Hamilton, Paine, and Burr -- in his book Revolutionary Characters. And while I am sure that Wood himself recognizes the fact that these seven men were far from alone in their endeavors to create a new nation, the fact remains that many important founders are often omitted from the historical dialogue.

Such is the case with Samuel Adams. Despite the fact that he is regularly referred to as the "Father" of the American Revolution -- historian Joseph Ellis calls him the "Lenin of the American Revolution" -- Samuel Adams is almost always omitted from the "Key Founder" classification. In our modern era, Sam Adams has probably become more of a beer symbol than a revolutionary icon. Even this blog is guilty of omitting Sam Adams from our discussions on early America. In our one year run, which has amassed over 600 posts, Sam Adams has only been mentioned IN ONE POST -- and even that post was quite brief of the topic. So how is it that a man who is often considered the father of the American Revolution, adversary of the Stamp Act, organizer of the Sons of Liberty, and all-around champion of the common man be so blatantly ignored?

In his excellent bio of Samuel Adams, author Mark Puls presents a compelling case that the modern historiography of Sam Adams has given most Americans a very skewed and incomplete understanding of the man who Thomas Jefferson referred to as, "truly the man of the Revolution." and "the patriarch of liberty." He writes:

Despite his many achievements and their lasting impact, his legacy goes largely unheralded in recent years, even during a wave of interest about the Founding generation. While Adams was hailed as the "Father of the American Revolution" in his own time, his role in the birth of a nation has been overshadowed by founders who went on to become U.S. Presidents or by men who rose to prominence during the inaugural federal government. Biographers and historians have assigned more significant places to men who had little influence before the Revolution in shaping the birth of the nation or forging its foundational ideals.

[...]

Since Adams' death in 1803, the assessments of his contributions to American history have undergone several revisions, based in part on the views of the Revolution itself. Nineteenth-century historians such as George Bancroft, in his 1882 exhaustive, six-volume "History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent" saw Adams as the major figure in American movement leading up to the war: "No one had equal influence over the popular mind." James K. Hosmer's 1888 biography, "Samuel Adams" ranked his subject second only to George Washington in importance to the founding of the United States.

[...]

Until the 1920s, historians treated Adams in the same generally positive light accorded the other Founding Fathers. A revision of his record began with Ralph V. Harlow's 1923 "Samuel Adams -- Promoter of the American Revolution", which portrayed Adams as a propagandist and zealot, a view furthered by John C. Miller's 1936 "Samuel Adams: A Pioneer in Propaganda".

In recent years, Samuel Adams has been treated by historians as a propagandist who stoked the passions of the poor and built resentment against the British to further his own career. Scholars such as Russell Kirk dismissed Adams as a "well-born demagogue" in his 1974 "The Roots of American Order."

Here Puls makes his disgust with the current Sam Adams historiography clear. The idea that the "father" of the American Revolution was a rabble-rousing, doomsday propagandist who preyed upon the ignorance and vulnerability of the poor tends to permeate the current historical interpretation of Sam Adams. Even the recent HBO miniseries, John Adams attempts to portray Samuel Adams as being little more than an ultra-passionate, angry, and vindictive leader of the masses:



Puls continues:

But the historical record and an examination of Adams' writings tell a very different story. Adams and the other colonists involved in the civil rights struggle were not an unthinking mob, but a highly reflective people who stated their case with reasoned arguments in pamphlets, letters, petitions, and newspaper articles. In his writings, Adams placed his faith in a logical persuasion, devoid of feckless emotional appeals, in the same manner of modern newspaper columnists. His readers were highly literate, and well versed in the allusions to ancient Latin and Greek writers and examples from antiquity from which he drew analogies. His crusade eventually drew in intellectuals such as John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin, as well as affluent men such as George Washington and John Hancock. Mob violence was common in England during the eighteenth century, but these protests never achieved any specific political goals. It's highly unlikely that the successful colonial resistance in the prewar years as well as the Revolution itself and the creation of an independent nation would have occurred without the involvement of the educated and affluent.

If the founders themselves were allowed to select the "key" contributors to the American cause, Samuel Adams may very well be among them. As historian Joseph Ellis states:"In the midst of the current surge of interest in the founders, the most conspicuous absence is that of Samuel Adams, an absence that most of his peers would have found inexplicable."

Or as his second cousin, John Adams stated, "Without the character of Samuel Adams, the true history of the American Revolution can never be written. For fifty years his pen, his tongue, his activity, were constantly exerted for his country without fee or reward."

Perhaps we could make one more slot for dear Sam in our "Key Founders" category?

*** It's worth mentioning -- and it will be the topic of a couple future posts to come -- that Samuel Adams was as devout a Christian as you can get. Perhaps not all of the "Key Founders" are "Theistic Rationalists" after all? ***

More Blog Recognition

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that Andrew Sullivan gave American Creation a link for the second time.

Thanks Andrew!

A Brief Timeout From Early America

I know our blog is focused on issues surrounding early America and the founding. However, today is an important day in American history that should be recognized. 65 years ago the Allied invasion of Normandy took place with roughly 200,000 troops involved, making it the largest amphibious invasion of all time.

Here is General Dwight D. Eisenhower's message to the brave soldiers of D-Day...65 years ago:

And here's FDR's address:

Some Blog Recognition

J. L. Bell of the Boston 1775 blog has referenced a posting done by Jon Rowe on George Washington's religion. I just wanted to return the favor by giving kudos to Boston 1775, which is an excellent blog on all things dealing with the American Revolution. Mr. Bell is an accomplished writer and his blog (along with its huge readership) reflects this fact.

Obama and Civil Religion

President Obama's speech in Cairo is making news. He, notably, reaches out to Islam and at the same time cites the Founding Fathers and Islam's rightful place at the table in America. And he's right; America was founded to be religiously pluralistic. Islam, along with Christianity, Judaism, and religious free thinking, are all American as George Washington and apple pie.

From his speech:

I am a Christian, but my father came from a Kenyan family that includes generations of Muslims. As a boy, I spent several years in Indonesia and heard the call of the azaan at the break of dawn and the fall of dusk. As a young man, I worked in Chicago communities where many found dignity and peace in their Muslim faith.

As a student of history, I also know civilization’s debt to Islam. It was Islam — at places like Al-Azhar University — that carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for Europe’s Renaissance and Enlightenment. It was innovation in Muslim communities that developed the order of algebra; our magnetic compass and tools of navigation; our mastery of pens and printing; our understanding of how disease spreads and how it can be healed. Islamic culture has given us majestic arches and soaring spires; timeless poetry and cherished music; elegant calligraphy and places of peaceful contemplation. And throughout history, Islam has demonstrated through words and deeds the possibilities of religious tolerance and racial equality.

I know, too, that Islam has always been a part of America’s story. The first nation to recognize my country was Morocco. In signing the Treaty of Tripoli in 1796, our second President John Adams wrote, “The United States has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Muslims.” And since our founding, American Muslims have enriched the United States. They have fought in our wars, served in government, stood for civil rights, started businesses, taught at our Universities, excelled in our sports arenas, won Nobel Prizes, built our tallest building, and lit the Olympic Torch. And when the first Muslim-American was recently elected to Congress, he took the oath to defend our Constitution using the same Holy Koran that one of our Founding Fathers — Thomas Jefferson — kept in his personal library.

It was nice to see the President cite the Treaty of Tripoli, which also stated that the United States government is not in any sense founded on the "Christian Religion."

I think the President's address sends the right message to the Muslim world. Though, I'll also credit G.W. Bush for trying to do the same thing. Bush took pains to note that our war was not with Islam but with a radical strain within Islam, that Islam, properly understood, is a "religion of peace," and that Muslims worship the same God Jews and Christians do. And a great deal of Bush's conservative Christian base balked at his message. President Obama, like Bush before him, simulaneously reached out to moderate Muslims and attempted to implicitly nudge the Islamic religion towards a more benign and enlightened direction. The difference is, for complicated reasons I don't need to get into, Obama is in a better position to deliver this message to the Islamic world than Bush.

And both Obama AND Bush delivered this message in large part because the American Presidency and its civil religion, established by George Washington and the other Founding Presidents, demanded it. I sometimes get criticized for focusing on the "key Founders" (a handful of men as seen on US currency) to explain American Founding politics. However, when it comes to explaining the PRESIDENCY, I'm on strongest ground in focusing on four or five men, because they were literally only four or five men. From Washington to Monroe none was identifiably orthodox Trinitarian Christian, and all, with rare exception, took pains to systematically avoid speaking in orthodox Trinitarian terms, or otherwise intimating that Christ was the only way to God. Their theism transcended so called "Judeo-Christian" politics; indeed they put Jews in the same box as Muslims as all believers in "true religion."

It may be naive for Bush and Obama to speak as though Islam is a religion of peace or that Jews, Christians and Muslims worship the same God. But, let us remember, that theological naivete was, by precedent, built into the American Presidency by Washington, J. Adams, Jefferson, and Madison. Obama and Bush walk in their shoes when they state such things as Jews, Christians and Muslims worship the same God.

As John Adams put it:

“It has pleased the Providence of the first Cause, the Universal Cause, that Abraham should give religion not only to Hebrews but to Christians and Mahomitans, the greatest part of the modern civilized world.”

– John Adams to M.M. Noah, July 31, 1818.

Or as Thomas Jefferson put it:

“Every religion consists of moral precepts, and of dogmas. In the first they all agree. All forbid us to murder, steal, plunder, bear false witness &ca. and these are the articles necessary for the preservation of order, justice, and happiness in society. In their particular dogmas all differ; no two professing the same....Among the Mahometans we are told that thousands fell victims to the dispute whether the first or second toe of Mahomet was longest; and what blood, how many human lives have the words ‘this do in remembrance of me’ cost the Christian world!…We see good men in all religions, and as many in one as another. It is then a matter of principle with me to avoid disturbing the tranquility of others by the expression of any opinion on the [unimportant points] innocent questions on which we schismatize, and think it enough to hold fast to those moral precepts which are of the essence of Christianity, and of all other religions.”

– Thomas Jefferson to James Fishback, Sept. 27, 1809

In discussing the controversy over funding the Christian religion in the state of Virginia, George Washington put Muslims in the same box as the Jews when he noted he had no problem with with government funding of the Christian religion, provided Jews and Muslims, or other non-Christians were exempted or accomodated from having their tax dollars support a religion in which they did not believe:

...I am not amongst the number of those who are so much alarmed at the thoughts of making people pay towards the support of that which they profess, if of the denomination of Christians; or declare themselves Jews, Mahomitans or otherwise, and thereby obtain proper relief.

-- George Washington to George Mason, October 3, 1785.

Moreover, Washington twice spoke of God as the "Great Spirit" when addressing Native Americans, once going so far as to pray in the name of the "Great Spirit." From a strict orthodox perspective, this is worse than praying to "Allah" because at least Allah claims to be the God of Abraham, while the Great Spirit makes no such claim.

And Madison and Jefferson too spoke of God as the "Great Spirit" when addressing American Indians who showed no desire to convert to Christianity.

When I discuss this dynamic with folks skeptical of my thesis, they oft-react, "the FFs were just acting as most politicians do today." Indeed, the FF Presidents did speak like Presidents Bush and Obama when they pretend or really believe that most or all religions worship the same God. But the American FF Presidents were the ones who started it! Before the American Founders, heads of state were almost always officially connected to various churches and were oft-both heads of church AND state. The American Founding Presidents created the tradition of Presidents who could at once invoke God, but also do so in a such an ecumenical, pluralistic way that they appeared to be all things to all people, even to those outside of the "Judeo-Christian" tradition.

The jurisprudence of Alexander Hamilton

[Picture: Alexander Hamilton, American Founding Father.]

Hello! I'm Mark in Spokane and this is my inaugural post here at American Creation. The excellent bloggers here have kindly invited me to be a contributor to his blog, and I am honored beyond words to have the privilege to share some of my thoughts with you all here. For my first full post here, I would like to sketch out some thoughts on the jurisprudence of one of our nation's Founders, Alexander Hamilton.

Hamilton has long been overshadowed by many of the the top-tier Founders, largely because he had the misfortune of getting killed by Aaron Burr in a dual before he could become president. Burr's own reputation never really recovered from the dual, either, and what had been a fairly stellar political career up to that point soon dwindled into weirdness. But that's a topic for another post! This post is dealing with Hamilton, who thanks to the work of folks like Richard Brookhieser, Gordon Wood and Ron Chernow, is finally starting to get some of the attention to which he is due. In this post, I would like to look at Alexander Hamilton's contributions to the world of constitutional law, specifically, his approach to interpreting the Constitution.

Hamilton is well-known for his defense of judicial review and the independence of the judiciary in the Federalist. His arguments in favor of the power of the judiciary are well-known, and I won't take up space here simply repeating what others have already said (hey, this is a blog post, not a law review article!). Instead, I want to look at Hamilton's approach to constitutional interpretation after the Constitution was ratified and during the time when he was in government. As Forest McDonald has noted, Hamilton's legal ideas were remarkably influential at the time, and "at least two of [Chief Justice John] Marshall's opinions were drawn directly from Hamilton's constitutional pronouncements."

Hamilton advocated a flexible approach to constitutional interpretation, one that provided for a generous and expansive reading of federal power. It is no surprise that this kind of view closely paralleled his general political principles. But Hamilton also insisted that this expansive view of government power be limited by the wording of the Constitution itself. Just as much as Jefferson, Hamilton was an enemy of the idea of a "living Constitution." As he commented when discussing the power of the Congress to authorize corporations: "Whatever may have been the intention of the framers of a constitution, or of a law, that intention is to be sought for in the instrument itself, according to the usual & established rules of construction." In addition, when discerning the intent of the Constitution's provisions, recourse outside of the text of the Constitution was to be avoided: "arguments drawn from extrinsic circumstances, regarding the intention of the convention, must be rejected."

Hamilton's approach to constitutional interpretation did not, therefore, reduce constitutional law to politics, nor was it an attempt to read the Constitution as an infinitely maliable text that would allow for the creation or recognition of new or novel rights. Just as much as his nemesis Jefferson, Hamilton believed that the Constitution's text was what was binding. Both were, in effect, proponents of classic original intent jurisprudence, where the intentions of the Framers of the Constitution are sought by examining the actual text of the Constitution, rather than speculating on what the Framers might have meant, or by looking at extrinsic sources to supply the intent of the document.

Hamilton's constitutional jurisprudence diverged from Jefferson's not over the question of original intent, but over the question of the explicit grant of authority to Congress under the Necessary and Proper Clause of the Constitution. Was the clause to be read expansively (as Hamilton and the Federalists advocated), or narrowly (as Jefferson and the early Democratic Republicans wanted). Hamilton was convinced that it should be viewed expansively, in light of the Constitution's grant of enumerated powers to Congress. By the terms of the clause, Congress had the power to do what was "necessary and proper" to carry out its expressed powers.

But in Hamilton's view, even this expansive reading of the Necessary and Proper Clause was still bracketed closely by the text of the Constitution itself. Proof of this is seen in Hamilton's advocacy of the federal government improving the network of internal canals and roads within the United States in order to strengthen the country's domestic military defenses. Hamilton made this suggestion while serving, under President Adams, as the field commander of the federal army during the Quasi-War with France.

An excessively expansive reading of the Necessary and Proper Clause, unhinged from the actual expressed powers of Congress, would see such internal defense improvements as being within Congress's overall military power with a possible connection to Congress's power to regulate interstate commerce. But that wasn't Hamilton's argument. Hamilton argued that Congress had the authority to establish the roads he proposed under its power to "establish post offices and post roads." But in order to have the authority to build canals, Hamilton argued, Congress would have to be empowered by a constitutional amendment.

That episode demonstrates the the constrained nature of Hamilton's way of reading of the Constitution. While committed to the idea of a flexible and vigorous federal government, Hamilton was also committed to the Constitution's function as a limitation on that government's power. When the text of the Constitution indicated that Congress had power, Hamilton urged that that power be used to its utmost. But when the text indicated that Congress did not have a given power, Hamilton insisted that the text be followed, even if he thought the text should be changed in order to facilitate better policy. Hamilton's jurisprudence was both active and conservative at the same time.

How cool is that?

Why Congregants Should Be Skeptical of Political Pastors

Jared Farley’s response to Pastor Leathley’s “Essay” of May 28, 2009, titled “Why God Was Expelled From School”


Pastor Steve Leathley, of the Bible Baptist Church in Cambridge, Ohio, has decided to disseminate his “knowledge” of the Founding Fathers and the meaning of the constitutional doctrine of separation of church and state through his own personal blog hosted off his congregations website. You will remember that Pastor Leathley and I had an exchange in the local newspaper earlier this year about the religious faith of George Washington, in which Leathley attempted to use excerpts from the debunked Washington Prayer Book.

Unlike the op-ed section of the newspaper, this blog allows Pastor Leathley to post his essays, obviously cultivated faithfully from various religious right sources, without providing anyone else the prospect of challenging his statements. I attempted to post comments pointing out his historical and legal errors and engaging him in constructive debate when I first became aware of his essays. However, he characteristically refused to publish any of my critique or even to correct any of the errors I had accurately described and documented.

Pastor Leathley’s most recent essay is titled “Why God Was Expelled From School”. It is riddled with historical errors, legal fallacies and regurgitated religious right propaganda. This is not surprising as I have listen to some of his sermons online and he certainly has a solid record of parroting religious right talking points and broadcasting historical misinformation from his pulpit, all which a faux appearance of authority within his church.

Why is any of this important? Because Pastor Leathley is not just an isolated case of a fundamentalist who has bought into the religious right playbook. As someone who was born and raised in this rural and conservative part of southeastern Ohio, I can report that many ministers in this area are in complete agreement with Pastor Leathley. It is amazing when listening to people out in the community or even my students how many accept these religious right books as valid, unbiased works. Many times I have listened to students make statements in class only to discover they have simply regurgitate something they have heard their preacher say or read in a religious right book.

What is wrong with his essay?

Fallacy #1: “In 1962 the Supreme Court ruled it ‘unconstitutional’ for prayers to be said in the public school system.”

This is an erroneous hyperbole often hear from fundamentalist and evangelical pulpits. It is really a scare tactic, an attempt to present the legal situation in the most alarming way possible to scare a congregation or readers. It is and always has been legal for individual students to pray privately in public schools. The date Leathley references is the date of the Engle v. Vitale (1962) ruling, but this landmark decision only prevents schools and their personnel from becoming involved in student prayers, which actually protects the students’ religious freedom. Prayer only becomes an issue when school personnel or school resources become involved, or when students begin to proselytize aggressively, make their fellow students uncomfortable, or disrupt the general learning environment. Otherwise, it is constitutional and should be completely acceptable for individual, private prayers to be said in public schools. If a students right to pray (within the framework described above) is violated, they have a legitimate legal case against the school system.

Fallacy #2: “In 1963 our Supreme Court ruled it ‘unconstitutional’ for the Bible to be used in our public school system.”

Again, this is simply an exaggerated and invalid statement. The 1963 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Abington Township School District v. Schempp only prevents the Bible from being used as a sacred book in the public school system. In similar fashion to how school personnel and resources cannot be utilized concerning religious prayers, the school cannot become involved in encouraging or requiring students to read the Bible in a devotional manner. However, schools may require students to read the Bible as part of history courses or in courses concerning world religious as long as it is presented as one of many books various cultures revere as sacred. The Bible cannot be presented to students as superior to other religious works (Koran, Book of Mormon, Talmud, or Rig Veda). Students may also privately read the Bible on their own time as long as they do not unnecessarily disturb other students, or disturb the general learning environment.


Fallacy #3: “In this letter President Jefferson used the phrase ‘separation between Church and State’ to assure the Association that the Government would make no laws restricting their free exercise of religion.”

Baptists in Connecticut already had freedom to exercise their religion in Connecticut. What they were complaining about was that the Congregationalist Church was the established church in that state and was funded through state general revenues. The State of Connecticut had granted Baptists and some other dissenters the right to apply for a special certificate to have their tax monies directed to churches and ministers of their own persuasion, but the process for obtaining such licenses were cumbersome and often biased. Thus, the Danbury Baptists were writing to express their hope that the Congregationalist Church would be disestablished, similar to how the champion of religious freedom, Jefferson, through his ally James Madison, had worked to disestablish the Episcopalian Church in Virginia in 1785.

The main part of the Danbury Baptist Association’s letter reads:

“Our Sentiments are uniformly on the side of Religious Liberty—That Religion is at all times and places a Matter between God and Individuals—That no man aught to suffer in Name, person or effects on account of his religious Opinions—That the legetimate Power of civil Goverment extends no further than to punish the man who works ill to his neighbour: But Sir, our constitution of goverment is not specific. Our antient charter, together with the Laws made coincident therewith, were adopted as the Basis of our goverment, At the time of our revolution; and such had been our Laws & usages, & such still are; that religion is consider’d as the first object of Legislation; & therefore what religious privileges we enjoy (as a minor part of the State) we enjoy as favors granted, and not as inalienable rights: and these favors we receive at the expence of such degrading acknowledgements as are inconsistant with the rights of freemen.” (bolding is mine, as is the case throughout this essay)

The line “That the legitimate power of civil government extends no further than to punish the man who works ill to his neighbor” is very clear and mirrors the language Jefferson used in his Notes on Virginia, where he remarked:

“The error seems not sufficiently eradicated, that the operations of the mind, as well as the acts of the body, are subject to the coercion of the laws. But our rulers can have authority over such natural rights only as we have submitted to them. The rights of conscience we never submitted, we could not submit. 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.”

In short, the Danbury Baptists are stating their belief that civil government has no authority in religious matters whatsoever, neither to violate their right to free exercise of religion or to violate their rights of conscience by using their tax monies to advance religious opinions with which they disagreed.

To understand further the dissenting Baptist opinion in Connecticut, it might be helpful to consider a political sermon by famed Baptist preacher John Leland. Rev. Leland, along with Isaac Backus, were two of the most fundamental allies of Jefferson and Madison in advocating a separation between church and state. In his sermon “The Rights of Conscience Inalienable”, which he delivered to the Baptist congregation at New London, CT in 1791, shortly after Rev. Leland relocated to New England and during the period of the ratification of the First Amendment, Leland argues that religious freedom consists of two parts, free exercise of the individual and protection of the rights of conscience.

While Leland’s entire sermon is well worth the read, there are several parts that I will highlight. Notice how he echoes many of the arguments that Thomas Jefferson made in his Notes on Virginia (which seemingly indicates he was a disciple of Jefferson on this topic). He writes:

“Is conformity of sentiments in matters of religion essential to the happiness of civil government? Not at all. Government has no more to do with the religious opinions of men than it has with the principles of the mathematics. Let every man speak freely without fear—maintain the principles that he believes—worship according to his own faith, either one God, three Gods, no God, or twenty Gods; and let government protect him in so doing, i.e. see that he meets with no personal abuse or loss of property for his religious opinions. Instead of discouraging of him with proscriptions, fines, confiscation or death; let him be encouraged, as a free man, to bring forth his arguments and maintain his points with all boldness; then if his doctrine is false it will be confuted, and if it is true (though ever so novel) let others credit it. When every man has this liberty what can he wish for more? A liberal man asks for nothing more of government.

The duty of magistrates is not to judge of the divinity or tendency of doctrines, but when those principles break out into overt acts of violence then to use the civil sword and punish the vagrant for what he has done and not for the religious phrenzy that he acted from.”

Leland continues:

“This certificate law is founded on this principle, ‘that it is the duty of all persons to support the gospel and the worship of God.’ Is this principle founded in justice? Is it the duty of a deist to support that which he believes to be a threat and imposition? Is it the duty of a Jew to support the religion of Jesus Christ, when he really believes that he was an impostor? Must the papists be forced to pay men for preaching down the supremacy of the pope, whom they are sure is the head of the church? Must a Turk maintain a religion opposed to the alcoran, which he holds as the sacred oracles of heaven? These things want better confirmation. If we suppose that it is the duty of all these to support the protestant christian religion, as being the best religion in the world—yet how comes it to pass that human legislatures have right to force them so to do? I now call for an instance where Jesus Christ, the author of his religion, or the apostles, who were divinely inspired, ever gave orders to or intimated that the civil powers on earth ought to force people to observe the rules and doctrine of the gospel.”

Rev. Leland is arguing that first, the government has no business in the religious realm and secondly, that all citizens have a "right to conscience" from having their tax money used for purposes they detest. Notice that he does not limit this right to fellow Protestants. He explicitly includes deists, Jews, Muslims and Catholics. This is important because the theory is posits is that no citizen should have their tax money used for religious ideas they believe “to be a threat and imposition”.

Leland’s sermon was well received, went into several printings and was distributed amongst dissenting circles throughout Connecticut and the rest of New England. This suggests strongly (although not direct proof) that the Danbury Baptists in Connecticut favored a very strict separation of church and state, which included a broadly defined conception of a right of conscience for all citizens, Christians and non-Christians alike (including protections for all citizens to not have their tax monies used in ways which violated their rights of conscience).

Also, notice the wording in President Jefferson’s response to the Danbury Baptist Association:

“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between church and State. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.”

First, Jefferson is saying he agrees with the opinions of the Danbury Baptists regarding the separation of church and state, that “the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions.” This should not surprise us as it has already been mentioned that the Danbury Baptists were parroting off Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia in composing their letter. But also notice that Jefferson invokes the conception of rights of conscience and declares that he hopes that this country will progress to the point were those rights will be RESTORED, meaning Americans did not completely have these rights in 1802. It is here that it becomes clear that Pastor Leathley is wrong arguing that Jefferson only wrote to “to assure the Association that the Government would make no laws restricting their free exercise of religion.” If Jefferson’s conception of the rights of conscience is anything like Rev. Leland’s use of the phrase, then Jefferson is saying that religious freedom includes the right not to have your tax money used for religious purposes for which a citizen disagrees. And remember, Leland extended that right to both Christians and non-Christians alike.

Fallacy #4: “Thomas Jefferson’s view of the part religion should play in education would more aptly be understood in light of the fact that in 1787, while he was serving in Congress, Congress passed the “Northwest Ordinance”, which Jefferson highly influenced.”

(I heavily utilize Chris Rodda’s “Liars For Jesus” (2006) in debunking this fallacy, especially chapter two titled “The Northwest Ordinance”.)

First, Pastor Leathley is incorrect that Thomas Jefferson was serving in the U.S. Congress during 1787. Jefferson did represent the Commonwealth of Virginia from 1783-1784. But in 1785, Jefferson replaced Benjamin Franklin as minister to France and served in that office until President Washington made him the first Secretary of State in 1790. However, Jefferson did highly influence the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, because he had composed the first piece of legislation governing that new territory in 1784, which the 1787 Northwest Ordinance was largely based upon. But it is very important to understand that Jefferson’s 1784 law did not contain anything about religion or education. That language was added later, not by a member of Congress, but by a pious businessman and orthodox Congregationalist minister (Dr./Rev. Manasseh Cutler), part owner of the Ohio Company, who demanded that the language be included before his company would agree to purchase land in the Northwestern Territory. Congress was massively in debt at this point and needed to sell the land plots in the Northwest Territory to generate revenues to pay off their debts. As such, they were forced to accept his proposal, really having little choice as there were few other potential buyers. However they still changed the language Cutler proposed. He wanted: “Institutions for the promotion of religion and morality, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged…” but Congress changed the wording to: Religion, Morality and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged…” Notice what they did. Rather than saying they would DIRECTLY support religious institutions, they simply gave lip-service to religion and morality and then said they would INDIRECTLY support it through support of public schools in the designated plots. It was this version that passed through the Confederation Congress in 1787, not Jefferson’s draft. And Jefferson had gone to Paris at that point, so he was not there to debate or even vote on it.

And to show how little Congress cared about the religious aspect of the Northwestern Ordinance, note that the only places where Congress ever ENFORCED it (reserving Lot 29 for religious purposes and not selling it for money) was in the limited Ohio Company Purchase and the Symmes Purchase, which did not even encompass half of the territory which would eventually become the State of Ohio, much less all of the Northwestern Territory. They did all of this to appease the Ohio Company and Cutler…and then promptly ignored it in their dealings with the rest of the Territory. When the Ohio Company later purchased a second plot of land and realized that Congress had not set aside all of the Lot 29s, they petitioned Congress to redress the issue, which Congress refused to do (see “Liars for Jesus” for more information, chapter 2 for more information).

What is most gulling about Pastor Leathley’s essay is that he asserts that Thomas Jefferson would have approved of the language contained within Article III of the 1787 Northwest Ordinance. It is hard to tell who would earn the title as the greatest separationist in U.S. History, but the competition would be between Jefferson and Madison. Jefferson was such a strong believer in keeping the government out of the religious realm that he refused to issue national declarations for days of fasting and prayer because he thought they violated the no establishment clause of the First Amendment. He explained in a letter to Presbyterian minister Samuel Miller from January 23, 1808:

“I do not believe it is for the interest of religion to invite the civil magistrate to direct its exercise, its discipline or its doctrines; nor of the religious societies, that the general government should be invested with the power of effecting any uniformity of time or place among them. Fasting and prayer are religious exercises; the enjoining them an act of discipline. Every religious society has a right to determine for itself the times for these exercises and the objects proper to them, according to their own particular tenets; and this right can never be safer than in their own hands, where the Constitution had deposited it. ….Everyone must act according to the dictates of his own reason, and mine tells me that civil powers alone have been given to the President of the United States, and no authority to direct the religious exercises of his constituents.”

But more specifically to the point, here is an excerpt from Jefferson’s “The Administration of Laws and the Description of Laws” (p. 273):

“Instead therefore of putting the Bible and Testament into the hands of the children, at an age when their judgments are not sufficiently matured for religious enquiries, their memories may here be stored with the most useful facts from Grecian, Roman, European and American history. The first elements of morality too may be instilled into their minds; such as, when further developed as their judgments advance in strength, may teach them how to work out their own greatest happiness, by shewing them that it does not depend on the condition of life in which chance has placed them, but is always the result of a good conscience, good health, occupation, and freedom in all just pursuits.”

Thus, Jefferson thought it better to fully educate children rather than indoctrinating them, because then when they encountered religious ideas, they could better investigate and judge the various theological arguments they would come across.

One should also consider the opinion of Jefferson’s strongest political ally on church/state separation, James Madison. Here is what Madison, the 4th President of the United States, wrote to James Monroe, the 5th President of the United States, when some members of the U.S. Congress attempted to insert the following language into the 1785 Ordinance (another forerunner to the 1787 Northwest Ordinance):

“There shall be reserved the central Section of every Township, for the maintenance of public Schools; and the Section immediately adjoining the same to the northward, for the support of religion. The profits arising therefrom in both instances, to be applied for ever according to the will of the majority of male residents of full age within the same.”

The proposal was defeated and the language was not included into the 1785 Ordinance. (Notice that Congress had the opportunity to insert basically the religious language later found in the 1787 Ordinance into the 1785 Ordinance, and they refused.)

Here is what James Madison wrote about this attempt to meld church and state in a letter to James Monroe from May 29, 1785:

“It gives me much pleasure to observe by 2 printed reports sent me by Col. Grayson that, in the latter Congress had expunged a clause contained in the first for setting apart a district of land in each Township for supporting the Religion of the majority of inhabitants. How a regulation so unjust in itself, so foreign to the Authority of Congress, so hurtful to the sale of the public land, and smelling so strongly of an antiquated Bigotry, could have received the countenance of a Committee is truly matter of astonishment. In one view it might have been no disadvantage to this State in case the General Assessment should take place, as it would have given a repellent quality to the new Country in the estimation of those whom our own encroachments on Religious Liberty would be calculated to banish to it. But the adversaries to the assessment begin to think the prospect here flattering to their wishes. The printed Bill has excited great discussion and is likely to prove the sense of the Country to be in favor of the liberty now enjoyed.” (I have correct some spelling for clarity in this quotation)

Notice how broadly Madison defines “religious liberty” here. Apparently to him, religious liberty included not only the free exercise of religion and the absence of a single established church, but also protection of the rights of conscience identified with the use one’s tax money.

Fallacy #5- “If “separation between Church and State” was a philosophy of early America, why did it take until 1962 for God (prayer, the Bible, etc.) to be expelled from school?”

Because schools, under the control of the states were not subject to the No Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution until the U.S. Supreme Court decided to “selectively incorporate” that part of the Bill of Rights after the adoption of the 14th Amendment after the conclusion of the American Civil War, applying its civil liberty protections to both the national government and the state governments. This happened in the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 1947, Everson v. Board of Education. You are right that for many decades after the passage of the First Amendment, that there was prayer in some public schools, daily Bible readings and postings of the 10 Commandments, but remember the states (and through them the local schools) were not required to observe the No Establishment Clause. But just because the individuals in these states and local communities did not respect the concept of separation of church and state does not mean that was the intention at the national level, which was subject to the No Establishment Clause.

It is true that Madison wanted to apply the No Establishment Clause to the states as well as the national government during the drafting of the First Amendment in 1791 (as did many members of Congress), but he narrowly lost that battle in the First Congress under the new document.

However, the U.S. Congress after 1802 largely required new states admitted to the Union to provide for some degree of separation of church and state in their state constitutions, including prohibitations on using public tax money for religious schools.

Fallacy #6-That the phrase “separation of church & state” does not appear in the U.S. Constitution or the Declaration of Independence makes it lack legitimacy.

Pastor Leathley is technically correct that the phrase does not appear in the U.S. Constitution, but neither do the short-hand terms for many other constitutional principals & doctrines the vast majority of Americans accept as legitimate. For example, the phrase “separation of powers” does not appear in the Constitution, but that clearly that principal is articulated by the framework of the Constitution. The phrase “checks and balances” does not appear in the Constitution, but that concept is part of the Constitution…right? Thus, just because an exact phrase does not appear in the Constitution does not mean the principal was not intended by the document. That is a logical fallacy.

Fallacy #7- Pastor Leathley seems to indicate that the Declaration of Independence is a “legal document”, along with the U.S. Constitution.

This premise is inaccurate. The Declaration of Independence has no legal authority in our Constitutional system. It is only an announcement the Continental Congress used to proclaim their intention to formally rebel against Britain.

In conclusion Pastor Leathley needs to learn an axiom I regularly remind my students of: "Not all opinions are equal, because some have better evidence to provide them legitimacy."

(Administrators- please feel free to clean this up for me, as this is my first post. Readers- please feel free to point out anything you believe is inaccurate or fallacious thinking on my part in the comments section.)