Title: The Faiths of the Founding Fathers
Author: David L. Holmes
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195300920
Pro:
• Based on extensive research of original source material
Con:
• Discussion of even more Founding Fathers would have been good
Description:
• Exploration of the religious beliefs of the Founding Fathers
• Explains what they thought the role of religion in American government should be
Book Review
The question itself is problematic: why should we care what they thought about religion? Does it matter what their personal religious beliefs were and how they thought religion and government should interact? All that should matter are the structures of government which they set up and which clearly separate religious from civil authority. Unfortunately, these personal views do matter to some, so investigation into those views has an impact upon the debates.
David L. Holmes has created an invaluable resource on this topic with his book The Faiths of the Founding Fathers. It's a relatively short volume written in a style which should be accessible to most people, so hopefully it will find a broad audience. Unfortunately, I don't think that it will tell many people what they would like to hear: for years Christian Nationalist leaders have been telling people that America was founded as a Christian nation, but Holmes demonstrates unequivocally that that isn't what the Founders personally believed in.
Six men are given their own chapters for detailed analysis: Ben Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe. In each case Holmes provides details about what they did and didn't believe by using information from their personal lives: did they attend communion, did they even attend church regularly, did they use deistic or traditional Christian terms for God, did they express belief in the divinity of Jesus, etc.
After examining primary reports and documentation, Holmes finds that none of the men most responsible for the creation of the American government would even qualify as "orthodox Christians" for their own era, much less according to the standards of conservative evangelical Christians today. Most were either Deists or "Christian Deists," a form of Deism which is heavily informed by Christianity rather than the other way around. If they themselves didn't personally adopt orthodox Christian doctrines, it's hardly reasonable to think that they intended the American government to promote or endorse those doctrines.
None of this means that religion wasn't important to these men. A few atheists have suggested that the Founders tended to be atheistic and that's not true. It's also not true that they led wholly secular lives on a personal level. What is true, however, is that they adhered to varying forms of Deism which had been the primary religious development out of the Enlightenment.
As a part of this, they constructed a secular system of government where religious liberty was given broad protections. They recognized that the freedom to investigate, innovate, and experiment in religious matters was important and that this could only occur in a social context where people are free to believe as they wish.
There were a few Founders who could be described as evangelical Christians, such as John Jay and Samuel Adams. None of the first five presidents were in this category, though. The biggest group of orthodox believers were actually the Founders' wives — not surprising, since women are statistically more religious than men and tend to follow more orthodox systems.
Specific causes of the wives' more orthodox tendencies included their lack of exposure to critical Deism in college, their exclusion from monastic groups where Deism had a strong role, and their role in educating the children with little more than the Bible. All of the Founders claimed to be Christian, but conservative evangelicals don't accept such self-reports from everyone today, so why accept them on the part of people in the past?
