Abstract
Matthew L. Harris and Thomas S. Kidd (eds),
The Founding Fathers and the Debate over Religion in Revolutionary America: A History in Documents
, Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2012; 208 pp.; 9780195326499, £60.00/US$99.00 (hbk); 9780195326505, £12.99/US$19.95 (pbk)
The founding of the United States of America is crucial to an understanding of Protestantism, liberalism, secularism. Sharper knowledge of the period would surely help the debate about religion and public life in Britain. The British perhaps have a tendency to assume that the American experience is not quite relevant to them, that the New World is another world. But the basic issues are of course the same: does the principle of religious liberty trump traditional theopolitical structures? Can the state be secular without marginalizing religion?
The new nation, as everyone knows, decided to separate Church and state; it declared religious liberty to be in opposition to religious establishments. Alas, it is a bit more complicated than that. Individual states were allowed to retain certain forms of establishment – usually requirements that office-holders be Protestant, but sometimes the full establishment of a church. It was the federal government (as well as a few states) that firmly established the principle of separation. But even here things are ambiguous: chaplains were appointed to Congress, and most early presidents called for days of fasting and prayer.
Despite such ambiguity, the principle of separation took root, making America the prime engine of the ‘secular liberalism’ that more or less holds sway in the West today. Why did it take root? What was its motivation? Was it on religious or secular grounds that the ideal of separation became a major feature of the founding era?
Beware of any book that claims to answer these questions. Look to the evidence. This book presents the key evidence (declarations, constitutions, pamphlets, sermons, letters) with admirable clarity.
The initial revolution had little interest in pitting religious liberty against traditional church structures; the Deist language of ‘inalienable rights’ was not yet applied to religion. Separationist ideas arose when states, particularly Virginia, drafted new constitutions. In that state, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, patrician Anglican Deists, allied with Baptists against the Anglican establishment, to produce an almost totally secular constitution, which influenced the federal First Amendment (written by Madison). So the motivation was both Deist and dissenting – it was certainly more liberal Protestant than anti-religious. (This alliance was echoed when Jefferson was president: he promised to defend the liberty of the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut – this time from Congregationalists). But in other states, the emphasis was on preserving some form of establishment from the seemingly corrosive effects of individual liberty. As the editors say in their introduction, ‘[T]hese state constitutions reveal the tensions between full religious freedom and the desire for religion to continue playing a prominent role in public life. Whatever religious freedom meant to Americans in the Founding period, few wanted religion to become an entirely private matter’ (p. 12).
By including plenty of more conservative voices, this book shows that the new nation did not have a single clear ideology, as one tends to assume: it was an argument between the principle of full religious liberty (rooted in Protestant idealism) and a loose form of establishment (privileges for Protestants). Careful attention to this can help us rethink contemporary assumptions about a conflict between ‘religion’ and ‘secular liberalism’ – on both sides of the Atlantic.