The Founding Myth Page 7

  Washington’s, Jefferson’s, and Morris’s actions are hardly those of devout, bible-believing Christians.

  A MORE INSIDIOUS RATIONALE underlies the Christian nationalist claim about the founders: the myth that only Christians are moral. The argument is that the United States was created by Christians for Christians because only they are moral,24 that Christianity is required for a moral society. There are two falsehoods tangled up in this claim. The first conflates religion with morality, and the second assumes that the founders did the same.

  Religion gets its morality from us, not the other way around. Even today, many people mistakenly believe that morality cannot exist outside of religion.25 The founders certainly did not make this mistake, as we’ll see in a moment. However, some founders did think that religion was necessary, not for themselves, but for the rest of society. This elitist belief does not equate religion and morality or suggest that religion is a prerequisite for moral behavior, but it is often mistakenly read as such by Christian nationalists. For many founders, religion was not the source of morality; they thought it was a substitute for morality: a substitute for those who didn’t have the time and education to discover moral truths on their own. Often, when the founders spoke of “religion and morality,” they were speaking not of one thing, but of two separate phenomena—religion for the people, morality for them.

  A cursory reading of George Washington’s 1796 Farewell Address might give the impression that he thought religion was necessary for society to succeed:

  Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports…. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.26

  “National morality” here means something akin to societal or collective morality, as opposed to the government as a moral agent. Alexander Hamilton wrote these lines, not George Washington.27 Hamilton was not referring to the government needing divine aid or religion requiring governmental aid, but to society requiring a morality Hamilton thought religion provided.

  This was also less a moral exposition than a political attack on Jefferson’s new Republican party. Biographer Ron Chernow has pointed out that these comments “arose from [Hamilton’s] horror at the ‘atheistic’ French Revolution.”28 Interestingly, although Washington included this sentiment in his final speech, he omitted Hamilton’s next sentence: “does it [national morality] not require the aid of a generally received and divinely authoritative Religion?”29 Washington’s edit suggests that he believed that any religion, not just Christianity, could replace morality. The Farewell Address conceives of religion and morality as two separate, distinct things—not as synonyms expressing the same thought, though Christian nationalists misread it that way.

  An engraving titled Leaders of the Continental Congress depicts, from left to right, John Adams, Gouverneur Morris, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Jefferson, c. 1894.

  Like Washington and Hamilton, John Adams spoke of religion and morality as distinct. As president, Adams wrote, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”30 In a later missive to Jefferson, he hypothesized about a world in which the masses were not checked by religion: “Without religion this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite society—I mean hell.”31 Though religion would check the masses, Adams did not believe “in the total and universal depravity of human nature, I believe there is no individual totally depraved…. While conscience remains there is some religion.”32 This letter, which is worth reading in full, goes on to lament people’s credulity, and Adams himself was incredulous that people ever submitted “to be taxed to build the temple of Diana at Ephesus, the pyramids of Egypt, Saint Peter’s at Rome, Notre Dame at Paris, [or] St. Paul’s in London.” Like Washington, Adams suggested that any religion, not only Christianity, can replace morality.

  Jefferson did not confuse religion and morality. He organized his library into three major divisions by subject: memory or history, philosophy or reason, and imagination or fine arts. There were numerous subcategories, including ethics. Ethics was further broken down into morality and moral supplements. Religion was assigned to the moral supplements section, along with law (see note for link to original image of his divisions outline).33 Religion was not morality, but a substitute or supplement. He wrote explicitly about this distinction: “On the dogmas of religion as distinguished from moral principles, all mankind, from the beginning of the world to this day, have been quarreling, fighting, burning and torturing one another, for abstractions unintelligible to themselves and to all others, and absolutely beyond the comprehension of the human mind.”34 (Note: what’s left of Jefferson’s personal library is now housed in the Library of Congress. It has been partially recreated after a fire, but is similarly organized.)

  Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and even Franklin and other founders did not think that religion was the source of morality, but its substitute. Madison, in The Federalist number 10, differentiates the two. “If the impulse and the opportunity [to create majority factions] be suffered to coincide,” he wrote, “we well know that neither moral nor religious motives can be relied on as an adequate control.”35

  These founders were not saying that religion is the source of morality or that an individual’s morality cannot exist without religion. They were claiming that religion is necessary for societal morality.

  And they were wrong.

  The educated elite, including the founders, achieved morality independent of religion, but they failed to extend the possibility of that achievement to others. They thought religion was needed for the commoners. The enlightened could use reason to discover morality, so they needed no religion other than a bare deism or theism, to which many luminaries ascribed. John Stuart Mill thought that “the world would be astonished if it knew how great a proportion of its brightest ornaments—of those most distinguished even in popular estimation for wisdom and virtue—are complete sceptics in religion.”36 He might have been writing of the founders.

  The Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Gordon Wood voiced this view in his book Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different (2006). Wood noted that “one would be hard put to demonstrate the ways [Thomas] Paine’s rationalistic religion or deism differed from the religious views of his contemporaries Franklin or Jefferson” and that such views “were common among the liberal-thinking gentlemen of the era.”37 While Paine was open about his views, expounding them in The Rights of Man, “Jefferson and other elites” confined their views to that elite circle, fearing that spreading them might undermine society’s moral order.38 While “gentlemen” such as Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Adams, and Franklin were “free of the prejudices, parochialism, and religious enthusiasm of the vulgar and barbaric,” the laity was not.39 Their attitude toward plebeians was patrician, as Wood points out. Washington referred to the masses as the “grazing multitude,” Adams spoke of the “common herd of mankind” or “common persons” with no idea of “Learning, Eloquence, and Genius,” and Gouverneur Morris thought they had “no morals but their own interests.”40

  Elsewhere Wood observes, “At the time of the Revolution most of the founding fathers had not put much emotional stock in religion, even when they were regular churchgoers. As enlightened gentlemen, they abhorred ‘that gloomy superstition disseminated by ignorant illiberal preachers’ and looked forward to the day when ‘the phantom of darkness will be dispelled by the rays of science, and the bright charms of rising civilization.’”41

  The founders may have been influenced by Enlightenment thinkers on this subject. We know that both Baruch Spinoza and John Locke profoundly influenced the founders’ thinking. Berated as an atheist and drummed out of Jewish society in Holland, Spinoza thought religion “in the highest degree necessary for the comm
on people who lack the ability to perceive things clearly and distinctly.”42 Locke thought that for the “vulgar” and the “mass of mankind” it was better to have divine rules than to “leave it to the long, and sometimes intricate deductions of Reason, to be made out [by] them. Such trains of reasonings the greatest part of mankind have neither the leisure to weigh; nor, for want of education and use, skill to judge of.”43

  Franklin is the most explicit on this point in an undated, unaddressed letter discussing a manuscript that criticized religion—possibly Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man. Franklin suggested that the letter’s recipient, who was also the manuscript’s author, “burn this piece before it is seen by any other Person.”44 He explained that he thought religion necessary to ensure that the “weak and ignorant” act ethically.

  You yourself may find it easy to live a virtuous life without the assistance afforded by religion; you having a clear perception of the advantages of virtue, and the disadvantages of vice, and possessing a strength of resolution sufficient to enable you to resist common temptations. But think how great a portion of mankind consists of weak and ignorant men and women, and of inexperienced, inconsiderate youth of both sexes, who have need of the motives of religion to restrain them from vice, to support their virtue, and retain them in the practice of it till it becomes habitual, which is the great point for its security.45

  Even if the founders were correct in this elitism and people really did need religion to prevent them from running amok, it does not follow that we are a nation founded on Judeo-Christian principles. That a republic requires morality and therefore a moral people, and therefore a religious people, does not mean it requires Christians. The founders’ guarantee of religious freedom for all makes it clear that they did not think so either. In fact, these Enlightenment thinkers and the founders they influenced shared an important constant: they did not view religion as valuable because of its truth claims or as a source of morality, but simply as a means of producing good behavior without a reasoned moral analysis. This is a severe blow to the Christian nationalist. Any religion would do; Judeo-Christianity was not special. Montesquieu, the political theorist the founders may have relied on more than any other, perhaps said it best: “even a false religion is the best security we can have of the probity of men.”46

  WHEN REVIEWING THAT IRREVERENT MANUSCRIPT, Franklin rhetorically asked, “If Men are so wicked as we now see them with Religion what would they be if without it?”47 [emphasis in original] Here, Franklin’s imaginative mind failed him. To be fair, Franklin and the other founders did not have the data we possess today. Social science now unequivocally shows that the less religious a society is, the better off it is. We now know that religion is not necessary for a society to succeed.

  In a metastudy examining this very question, sociologist Phil Zuckerman explains, “Murder rates are actually lower in more secular nations and higher in more religious nations where belief in God is deep and widespread. And within America, the states with the highest murder rates tend to be highly religious, such as Louisiana and Alabama, but the states with the lowest murder rates tend to be among the least religious in the country, such as Vermont and Oregon. Furthermore, although there are some notable exceptions, rates of most violent crimes tend to be lower in the less religious states and higher in the most religious states. Finally, of the top 50 safest cities in the world, nearly all are in relatively nonreligious countries, and of the eight cities within the United States that make the safest-city list, nearly all are located in the least religious regions of the country.”48

  Additionally, sociologists and Holocaust scholars, “in their studies of heroic altruism during the Holocaust, found that the more secular people were, the more likely they were to rescue and help persecuted Jews.”49 In fact, when any given factor of societal health or well-being is measured, the less religious countries score better. The least religious countries:

  Have the lowest rates of violent crime and homicide

  Are the best places to raise children and to be a mother

  Have the lowest rates of corruption

  Have the lowest levels of intolerance against racial and ethnic minorities

  Score highest for women’s rights and gender equality

  Have the greatest protection and enjoyment of political and civil liberties

  Are better at educating their youth in reading, math, and science

  Are the most peaceful

  Are the most prosperous

  Have the highest quality of life.50

  This pattern also exists within the United States. Those states that are the most religious have more societal ills, and tend to:

  Have the highest rates of poverty

  Have the highest rates of obesity

  Have the highest rates of infant mortality

  Have the highest rates of STDs

  Have the highest rates of teen pregnancy

  Have the lowest percentage of college-educated adults

  Have the highest rates of murder and violent crime.51

  This, of course, does not prove that religion causes immoral behavior, but it confirms that religion is not required for people to behave morally.

  Author Michael Gaddis relates a story that answers Franklin’s fearful question about the wickedness of a human race without religion. In fifth-century Egypt, a Christian monk named Shenoute denounced a local pagan magnate, ransacked his house, and smashed his idols. The pagan accused Shenoute of banditry and he responded, “There is no crime for those who have Christ.”52

  People who believe they are acting in accord with a higher law are giving themselves a license to do anything. That is, as the physicist Steven Weinberg observed, the real danger of religion: “With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”53

  The founders should have paid more attention to Thomas Paine, who was closer to the mark. Paine wrote, “Accustom a people to believe that priests or any other class of men can forgive sins, and you will have sins in abundance.”54 Sins that can be “forgiven” without real punishment, without the victim’s consent, without involving the civil law, are more likely to be committed. (Perhaps this is one reason the Catholic Church is failing so abominably to protect the children in its charge.)

  And if Jefferson is right, that our actions—“our lives”—say more about our religion than does anything else, the fact that the founders chose to keep religion and government separate speaks volumes. By protecting the freedom of religion and divorcing government and religion, the founders guaranteed that religion would flourish in the new country. The benefits of the religion they thought necessary for the common people would be assured by keeping the two forever separate.

  Portrait of Thomas Paine, c. 1851.

  IF THE FOUNDERS BELIEVED THAT RELIGION was important to ensure moral behavior for the masses but not for themselves—the educated elite—it means the founders were moral without religion. It means they built a government using their own morality, not religion. And this eviscerates the Christian nationalist claim.

  That the founders did not look to the bible or religion turns out to be an important character trait for the formation of America. The prime movers among the founders showed a liberality and unorthodoxy in religion, a characteristic that often leads one to question other established “truths” such as the legitimacy of a monarchy. There is a strong correlation between reformers and religious heterodoxy.55 People who are more likely to question the political status quo are more likely to question religion, and vice versa. If the founders had been bible-beating believers, they might never have thought to revolt against an empire and declare independence.

  3

  Declaring Independence from Judeo-Christianity

  “This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people, was the real American Revolution.”

  — John Adams, letter to Hezekiah Nile
s, February 13, 18181

  Christian nationalists often argue that the Declaration of Independence embodies Judeo-Christian principles.2 And, as it is one of our founding documents, they claim that our nation is Judeo-Christian because of the Declaration’s religious language—specifically the four references that many read as invoking a supernatural power: “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” “endowed by their Creator,” “Supreme Judge of the World,” and “divine Providence.” The truth is both subtler and more exciting.

  “The independence of America, considered merely as a separation from England, would have been a matter of but little importance,” wrote Thomas Paine.3 He is correct: the Declaration was not just about political separation. Nor did it establish a new country. Rather, independence was important, as Paine again correctly observed, because it was “accompanied by a revolution in the principles and practices of governments.”4 The Declaration of Independence gave voice to the most important shift in political thought in history, but it did not establish a new nation, a government, or a legal system.5 The Declaration “dissolve[d] the political bands” that connected the colonies to Great Britain. It did not create; it severed, which is far simpler than nation-building. “It is much easier to pull down a Government, in such a Conjuncture of affairs as We have seen, than to build up,” remarked John Adams.6 The Constitution, not the Declaration, created our government and laws.7

  In fact, the Declaration cannot even properly be said to have severed the connection with Great Britain. It simply announced the separation. Two days before the Declaration was adopted, the Continental Congress approved Richard Henry Lee’s resolution, which John Adams had seconded, that “these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.”8 The vote that approved Lee’s resolution (12–0 with New York abstaining) actually severed the political ties.