Fixating on the Founders

David Barton received a quick mention in yesterday’s “First Links,” as he’s rapidly become a celebrity in evangelical circles for purportedly offering a reinterpretation of America’s Founding Fathers and their views of religion in public life.

Those concerned to defend the role of religion in public life are understandably attracted to the work he’s doing. And as he often points out, it is true that there is less in the Founding Fathers’ thought which (overtly, at least) takes the hard line against faith in public life presented by today’s secular litigants. But Barton is also fond of “rehabilitating” Jefferson’s views of religion, and other such perilous endeavors, and seems to have a tendency to favor ideology over nuance. I can’t claim to have read enough of his treatises to assess his work holistically, but I think the enthusiasm his project elicits from religiously-serious people points to a greater conundrum we often face often face when trying to defend the role of religion in American history.

It’s hard to deny that Christianity is—historically and sociologically speaking—omnipresent in American culture, and that it’s provided both the vocabulary and the moral resources for some of the most important correctives to our political settlement when it’s gone adrift (abolitionism, religious liberty claims, early-20th century reformism, civil rights, the pro-life movement, etc.). But, for some reason, so many on the right choose just one particular moment (and one particular set of leaders) from our history and attempt to wring from this every last drop of sentiment that might even be vaguely pro-Christianity. This can easily lead to disingenuousness or shoddy scholarship, not unlike what critics have (fairly or unfairly) accused David Barton of.

In their zeal to articulate a more fluid conception of church-state relations than the misused and misunderstood “wall” line affords, some descend into outright silliness, like citing the fact that the Constitution uses “In the Year of Our Lord” as evidence that the Founders were unanimous in their support for Christianity in the public square. This is emblematic of some of the more desperate attempts to put a favorable gloss on what is a more problematic reality. The actual religious beliefs of the Founders are still subject to considerable debate, though most of the consensus seems to agree there was a spectrum of belief among the most well-known ones—some, like Adams, were devout and orthodox Protestant Christians; others, like Madison and Jefferson, were in fact Deists; and still others, like Washington, fell somewhere in between.

But I can’t understand why many religiously-minded scholars think incessantly arguing this is necessary for their case. A far more grounded (and effective) argument can be made in favor of religion in the public square if the obsessive fixation with the Founding Fathers is expanded to a more holistic view of American history and culture, one which recognizes other foundings and alternative traditions. For there was an America and there were Americans long before the generation of 1776 fought the Revolution. Why the Puritan progenitors of Massachusetts, for example, receive so little mention in today’s discourse is baffling, as their mentality, suffused with notions of covenant, piety, and communitarianism, arguably shaped America’s long-term culture far more profoundly than did the political actions of the formal founders. Indeed, in Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (another source the religious should be rushing to embrace, but tend to overlook or treat superficially) the Puritan voyage of 1620 and its effects receive page upon page of analysis, while 1776 receives scarcely a mention at all. That deafening silence is not unintentional.

But if conservatives still cannot shake their overriding fascination with the Founders, why not at least look at the full diversity of that group, rather than simply the headline names? There are dozens of attendees from the Conventions of 1776 and 1789 who might make the case a much easier sell: men like Charles Carroll (the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence), John Witherspoon (a Presbyterian minister), or George Mason, to name but three.

In any event, there’s a wealth of source material being strangely ignored in these arguments.