Joseph Ellis Vs. Michael Novak: Were the Founders Religious?

Joseph Ellis

Although the Declaration of Independence mentioned “Nature’s God” and the “Creator,” the Constitution made no reference to a divine being, Christian or otherwise, and the First Amendment explicitly forbid the establishment of any official church or creed. There is also a story, probably apocryphal, that Benjamin Franklin’s proposal to call in a chaplain to offer a prayer when a particularly controversial issue was being debated in the Constitutional Convention prompted Hamilton to observe that he saw no reason to call in foreign aid. If there is a clear legacy bequeathed by the founders, it is the insistence that religion was a private matter in which the state should not interfere.

In recent decades Christian advocacy groups, prompted by motives that have been questioned by some, have felt a powerful urge to enlist the Founding Fathers in their respective congregations. But recovering the spiritual convictions of the Founders, in all their messy integrity, is not an easy task. Once again, diversity is the dominant pattern. Franklin and Jefferson were deists, Washington harbored a pantheistic sense of providential destiny, John Adams began a Congregationalist and ended a Unitarian, Hamilton was a lukewarm Anglican for most of his life but embraced a more actively Christian posture after his son died in a duel.

One quasi-religious conviction they all shared, however, was a discernible obsession with living on in the memory of posterity. One reason the modern editions of their papers are so monstrously large is that most of the Founders were compulsively fastidious about preserving every scrap of paper they wrote or received, all as part of a desire to leave a written record that would assure their secular immortality in the history books. (When John Adams and Jefferson discussed the possibility of a more conventional immortality, they tended to describe heaven as a place where they could resume their ongoing argument on earth.) Adams, irreverent to the end, declared that, if it could ever be demonstrated conclusively that no future state existed, his advice to every man, woman, and child was to “take opium.” The only afterlife which they considered certain was in the memory of subsequent generations, which is to say us. In that sense, these very blog posts are a testimonial to their everlasting life.

Michael Novak

The question of the religion of the U.S. Founding Fathers, a subject addressed at the Britannica Blog by historian Joseph Ellis last week, has been much under-researched during the past century. If we limit the field simply to the top one hundred Founders–the 89 who signed either the Declaration or the Constitution or both, plus another ten or so who greatly helped to shape the nation–it is surprising how few books we have, or even monographs, that explore the depth and range of their practice of public religion, and even of their own internal religious journeys. It seems fair to say that the chief interests of the last two generations of historians have, for the most part, been far more secular than those of the founding period. I am lucky enough to have Joseph Ellis as a sometime-colleague in some seminars we share, and very much admire his devotion to the history of the Founders, which is so relatively rare these days. Professor Ellis warns against the motives of some “Christian advocacy groups,” and he is correct to do so. But contemporary secularists, more numerous and more aggressive than in the past, may also display questionable motives in their reports on the Founders’ religious life.

There is much public evidence that the top Founders saw religion as considerably more than a “private” matter, even though all agreed that religion, at least the religion in which they were formed, requires that each conscience consult only the evidence available to each. Their practice was often public–we mean, in the official acts and discourse of the state–and at the same time respectful of the diversity of consciences.

Jefferson thought it his duty to support the Sunday religious service convened in the Capitol building, the largest church service in the nation each Sunday, and to send the Marine Band to provide the music. The second largest service, a little later, was in the Supreme Court Building. From Washington to Lincoln, Thanksgiving Day proclamations included the conviction that “It is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God,” and also “humbly to implore his protection and favor,” and to “beseech him to pardon our national and other transgressions.” Such a god is neither the god of pantheism nor of deism.

Article III of the Massachusetts Constitution, whose chief author was John Adams, obliged each local jurisdiction to pay for schooling in the Protestant religion. When opponents called this an infringement of conscience, Adams replied, in effect, you don’t have to believe in that religion, but if you want the law-abidingness that that religion inculcates, you have to pay for it. Since the Constitutional Convention left to individuals and the states all rights except those expressly conceded to the federal government, it said nothing about family, or education, or science, or the arts, or religion. It did not include the First Amendment, which was added some years later. Then, far from forbidding the establishment of religion in individual states (at least six had established churches for another generation), the phrasing of the First Amendment was carefully construed: “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion…” that is, neither for it nor against it; that choice was left to the individual states. Nor could Congress establish any one religion for the federal nation as a whole. Some were Anglicans, some Congregationalists, some Baptist, some Presbyterians; there were at least five synagogues spread through the states, and some thirty thousand Catholics. Some, at least among the men (seldom the women), were deists. Tom Paine, the most anti-biblical, tried to warn the French in 1789 against trying to build a republic on atheism, lest it lose any ground for the rights it declared and was thrown in jail for the trouble.

There was no more need for the Constitution to mention God than to abrogate the great Christian principle of limited government: “Give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

Most Christians even today regard immortal life as a communion with God, with their friends, and all those historical greats whom they admire–an everlasting conversation. So did virtually all the Founders in their brief asides on the subject.

Finally, it is really not possible to demonstrate from Washington’s public decrees that the Providence to whom he asked his army and fellow citizens to pray was “pantheistic.” On the contrary, his public prayers as commanding General and as President expected Providence to favor liberty and thus, though both prayed to the same Providence, the American cause over the British. He expected his God–and the nation–to “interpose” his divine action in the course of the war, and in the later course of American history.

And just as the American Founders held that the natural rights they declared belonged not solely to them but to all humankind, so the God to whom they prayed did not belong solely to them, but is the Almighty Lord of all, who sits in judgment over this nation and others. President Washington did not scruple, in his eloquent message to the Hebrew Congregation of Savannah, to identify the God “Jehovah” who led the Jewish people in Israel, with the Providence who led Americans through their founding period. He wrote elsewhere that this Providence was so “signal,” and so frequently in evidence in concrete events, that Americans did not merely believe in it but had “experienced” it.