Yes

by Marcus Clavys

Created on: August 02, 2010

There is no doubt that the American Founding was a culmination of many different things, and it's just as clear that there is no black and white answer to the question of religion and the founding of America. There were several important ways in which the United States was founded as a Christian nation, and some significant ways in which it was not. Understanding all this takes a bit of unfolding, and the best place to start is by putting ourselves back in the minds and times of the Founders in the summer of 1787, when some of the greatest men in the nation were debating the future of the United States' government.

THE WORLDVIEW OF THE AMERICAN FOUNDERS

The Founders drew from many sources in their deliberation, but especially from the four great societies of Athens, Rome, Jerusalem, and London. The Greek and Roman concepts of government and the Hebrew and Christian concepts of duty and liberty were brought together and re-formed in the crucible of the Age of Reason. The resultant Enlightenment was in some significant ways a rebirth of Hellenic political thought tempered by a solid dose of Christian philosophy and theology, all modified by the emerging rationalism or the times.

An important question to ask in deciding the Christian nature of the Founding is whether the Founders were closer to us today - to us and the shaping ideas of our world, to men such as Darwin, Sartre, and Heidegger - or if they were closer to thinkers such as Aquinas, Copernicus, and Newton. It's clear that in their time, academic philosophy hadn't yet experienced the sort of "human freedom" of Sartrean existentialism nor the Darwinian idea of ordered chaos, and the Founding principles of natural rights was therefore presumed to necessarily stem from divine order and divine authority.

It must be understood that, no matter how familiar men such as Washington and Jefferson seem to us, they would find much more sympathy and have much more in common with many medievalists than they would with the thinkers of our day. Their world was permeated by the sense that men lived in a morally ordered cosmos, that human beings held a high place in a great chain of being, and that they were endowed by God with natural rights and responsibilities. This presumption of order is seen in the influential writings of John Locke, for instance, and of course in the Declaration of Independence ("the laws of Nature and Nature's God," the "Creator," etc). The Framers did not talk about "human rights" as we do today, carrying a load of existentialist presumptions, but about "natural rights," which were rooted in the laws of nature as ordained by nature's God.

DEISM AND THE FOUNDERS

Some have claimed that the Founders were themselves not Christians, and that their work cannot therefore have been Christian. Certainly, we are in no place to judge their surrender to Christ, and we do not know how many among them truly were Christians in this sense. However, their work and their entire world was profoundly a product of Christian ideology and culture, and in this sense their entire world was more Christian than ours is today.

Certainly, Benjamin Franklin wasn't a very strict Christian. It seems that both he and Thomas Jefferson had their qualms about the divinity of Jesus Christ. A number of the Framers have been called deists. But none of that really matters, because one can hold a Christian worldview and ideology (ideas about man, the world, and God) without fully embracing either Christian belief or theology. Thomas Jefferson cut all the miracles out of the Bible, but kept the rest, because he considered it a great moral teaching. Likewise, Benjamin Franklin had a great deal to say in praise of the certain sort of values which religion instilled.

All this is a part of the reason why the first seal proposed for America, designed by none other than Franklin, Jefferson, and Adams, read: "Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God." We can clearly see the cultural Christianity of "irreligious" men such as Franklin and Jefferson showing through, and if Christianity permeated even their worldview, it certainly did for the rest of the Founders.

THE BIBLE AND THE FOUNDERS

We can further see that the language and ideas of the Bible provided definitions and justifications for many of the terms and arguments of the American Revolution. The Bible was a grand commonality, shared by all early Americans, which is why it was quoted nearly 3-5 times more than any other source. As Alexis de Tocqueville noted in his travels through America in the early 1830s, there was not a house he visited which did not have a Bible. Numerous concepts of the American founding were drawn from biblical understandings because that was the language of the time. George Washington explicitly drew from Micah 4:4 several times, for instance, in defining liberty: that every man should sit under his vine and fig tree, and no one would make him afraid.

The Founders' world was so entirely and profoundly Christian that, very likely, they did not even see this completely themselves. To refer to colonial America as a "Christian culture" is speak somewhat redundantly.

We have still foregone looking into America's heritage in the Pilgrims, the Puritans, and the Great Awakening that fired the whole nation. We haven't examined Locke's "Second Treatise on Government," which is an apologetic for natural rights argued from a biblical perspective. Given all that has been said, it's clear that anyone would find great difficulty arguing that the Founders' core beliefs did not somehow play an essential part in the most important work of their lives. It would be even harder to dispute that these values were in fact Judeo-Christian values, mainly because, what other values would they be?

The question that gets to the heart of the matter is, Why would we have any reason at all to believe that the Founders were somehow entirely cleaved from their own culture and world, which were both thoroughly Judeo-Christian? There is no reason to believe this, and this means that the answer must quite simply be yes, America was a Christian nation when it was founded.

A CIVIC RELIGION, NOT A RELIGIOUS BELIEF

To say that America was a Christian nation when it was founded is not the same thing as saying that America was founded to BE a Christian nation, of course. America was created from the cloth of Christian religious and philosophical beliefs in God and the universe, and the Founders too were cut from this cloth. But we must be clear that America is not a Christian nation in the sense that we should expect to find Jesus Christ in the preamble to the Constitution. America was not founded in the name of Christ, it was not explicitly an endeavor in surrender to Christ, and the American founding was not therefore Christian in a spiritual sense.

RELIGION AND THE FUTURE OF THE NATION

The logical question is whether the Founders expected the nation to remain Christian, and what that would mean. There is no better way to gauge the importance of religion for the Founders than to look at the plans they laid out for eventual expansion of the United States, and to see the character they sought to instill in their political children. The blueprint for how the expansion of Union territories into the frontier was laid out in a document called the Northwest Ordinance, which makes clear the connection in the Framers' mind between religion (and, we can safely presume, the religion they knew) and good government. It reads, "Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged." (Article 3)

The Founders expected religion to continue to play an essential part in the future of America, because they held that religion and morality were inseparable, and they knew there could be no politics without morality. This may seem strange to us today, but the Founders' believed they were on the cusp of a wave of Enlightenment which would continue to increase their knowledge of the universe and God through the faculty of their reason. Their theory of natural rights, which was as deeply rooted in their Christian worldview as in Enlightenment reasoning, revealed their profound belief that reason could in fact reveal morality. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter to Roger Weightmann on the issue of slavery: "All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God."

Today we struggle with the difficulty that the cooperation of reason and religion has not, in fact, opened up to us an ever-increasing bounty of moral truth. We in our modern times are more philosophically desolated than any people in the history of the world. The Founders, unfortunately, were wrong in expecting that we would find our way by rationalism, rather than losing it. To decide the political questions of religion and politics today, therefore, we cannot simply turn back and adopt their presumptions. Our problems are new and different. At the same time, our own uncertainty in our times should not dissuade us from affirming the simple fact that America, when it was founded, was decisively a nation of Christian character and overwhelmingly a nation of Christian belief.

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