Secular Right

The New York Times Magazine has a long piece, How Christian Were the Founders?, which outlines the efforts of school board members of fundamentalist inclinations to shift the narrative about the founding of the American republic. In short, these activists would like children to understand that the United States was founded as a Christian nation by Christian men. From this generality follows specific points, such as the rejection of the legal validity of the concept of church-state separation. In any case, I tend to endorse this position:

In fact, the founders were rooted in Christianity — they were inheritors of the entire European Christian tradition — and at the same time they were steeped in an Enlightenment rationalism that was, if not opposed to religion, determined to establish separate spheres for faith and reason. “I don’t think the founders would have said they were applying Christian principles to government,” says Richard Brookhiser, the conservative columnist and author of books on Alexander Hamilton, Gouverneur Morris and George Washington. “What they said was ‘the laws of nature and nature’s God.’ They didn’t say, ‘We put our faith in Jesus Christ.’ ” Martin Marty says: “They had to invent a new, broad way. Washington, in his writings, makes scores of different references to God, but not one is biblical. He talks instead about a ‘Grand Architect,’ deliberately avoiding the Christian terms, because it had to be a religious language that was accessible to all people.”

Or, as Brookhiser rather succinctly summarizes the point: “The founders were not as Christian as those people would like them to be, though they weren’t as secularist as Christopher Hitchens would like them to be.”

I suspect that a knowledge of historical context really makes this much more comprehensible But most people are either too ignorant or plain stupid to really attain any level of knowledge which would allow for context. And we do not live in a culture which cedes to men such as Richard Brookheiser, a biographer of the founders, any special credibility.

We do have personal and public pronouncements of men such as John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. The issue with moderns interpreting their words and associations is that these men must be understood in the context of their times, not our times. Both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson seem to have been proponents of Unitariantism. Today when we talk about Unitarianism in the United States we are talking about a predominantly non-Christian religion (i.e., the Unitarian-Universalist association does not affirm a Christian creed, or, for that matter any creed, though a minority of Unitarian-Univesalists are part of a Christian faction within the denomination). Adams was a public Unitarian, not atypical in New England where the sect was a liberal movement within Congregationalism (his son, John Quincy Adams, was also a Unitarianism, though he admitted to personally being attracted to Trinitarianism in his correspondence). Jefferson was in private a proponent of Unitarianism, but his religious associations in public were with the traditional Episcopal (formerly Anglican) church of his class and region. Both of these men rejected Trinitarianism, while for most of his life Jefferson seems to have strongly leaned toward a spare Deism. To modern Christians and non-Christians living in the United States these men would not be considered Christians. But, it seems that both would consider themselves Christian (Jefferson may have sworn off the term earlier in his life when his hostility toward religion was strongest).
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