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Brooke Allen vs. Michael Novak: Were the Founding Fathers Christian?

[HNN Editor: Brooke Allen is the author of Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers. Michael and Jane Novak are the authors of Washington's God. Recently Allen and the Novaks have engaged in a feisty debate at Britannica Blog about the religious faith of the founders, here.]

It was sad to read Ms. Allen’s description of my daughter Jana and me as “Mr. And Mrs. Novak.” Of course, we could already see from her blog that she had not even taken into her hands our recent dispassionate study, Washington’s God. Meanwhile, other evidence in her blog showed that she had not bothered to look, either, at my own earlier book On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding. That left poor Ms. Allen arguing against a thesis of her own imagining, rather than against the actual argument of those two books.
For my part, I very much appreciate Ms. Allen’s own book, Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers, which takes up a perfectly sensible subject and handles it in a perfectly sensible way. Her thesis is that the major founders were not Christians but skeptics. Her method is to pick only six of them for closer study (Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Washington and Hamilton), all of whom, she judges, fit her thesis.

But the first two of these six are identified by nearly everybody, including me, as outliers who stand at the leftmost extreme of the founders – outliers, skeptics indeed, barely if at all Christian. The next two, Madison and Adams, at least by their public actions during their terms in office (whatever their post-presidential, private lives), show clear signals of Christian conviction and/or accommodation. Their case is more complex than Ms Allen faces. Consider simply Article III of the new Massachusetts Constitution drafted and defended by John Adams, mandating state support for religious schools throughout the commonwealth.

Concerning the last two, Hamilton and Washington, there is a preponderance of evidence on the side of the influence of Christian faith upon their practice as public servants. As Washington’s speechwriter, for instance, Hamilton wrote some of the most vividly biblical addresses and public proclamations that General and (later) President Washington ever delivered. Similarly, no one who actually analyzes the public speeches and proclamations of the latter can plausibly make the case that Washington was merely a deist. The evidence of his emphasis upon a biblical God who forgives sins, who guides events and who as a matter of undeniable experience intervened often on the American side (the side of liberty) during the War of Independence, a Creator who is owed not only private worship, but also a whole nation’s worship and gratitude — and several other such biblical motifs – is simply far too strong.

In other words, Ms. Allen makes matters too easy for herself by cherry-picking her founders – and even then, in four out of six cases, she fails to convince.

Another major problem with her thesis: “We the People of the United States,” not solely Ms. Allen’s skeptical six, ratified the Constitution, and thus were in an important but unconventional sense founders of this nation. A goodly portion of these founding people, admittedly, were unchurched and skeptical, but the public speech of nearly all of them was far more biblical, even Christian, than one is likely to hear today in newsrooms or on college campuses. The title of her book shows that Ms. Allen does not really believe that most of the American people at the time of the founding were “not Christians” but “men of the Enlightenment,” in the way that she portrays Jefferson and Franklin.

A further problem is that, if Ms Allen had expanded her researches to all the main official “founders,” say, the eighty-eight men who signed either the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, her portrait would have been hugely different. If she had examined the public religious speech of the eighty-two of these that she simply ignored, she would have been led far beyond Jefferson and Franklin. Had she studied Benjamin Rush, who some thought the smartest and most learned man in the colonies, or John Witherspoon, leading congressman, the President of Princeton and easily the most influential academic in the history of the United States, or Charles Carroll, one of the two largest funders of the war of independence, or James Wilson, or John Dickinson, or Samuel Huntington, or Sam Adams, or many another, she would have drawn a portrait almost the reverse of the one she actually produced.

To be sure, if one imagines an extreme spectrum, with the totally skeptical, anti-Christian, or even unmistakably non-Christian few at the one end, and the devoutly and publicly Christian cohort at the other end, it is not clear that anyone qualifies for the pure extreme positions at either end. That is one reason why I call my own tentative and exploratory study of the religious beliefs of the top 100 founders On Two Wings. (To reach 100, I suggest adding to those 88 mentioned above some further outstanding public figures of the era such as Abigail Adams, Tom Paine, George Mason and others)....
Read entire article at Michael Novak at Britannica Blog