It is hard to believe that
George Bush has ever read the works of George Orwell, but he seems, somehow, to
have grasped a few Orwellian precepts. The lesson the President has learned
best--and certainly the one that has been the most useful to him--is the axiom
that if you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe
it. One of his Administration's current favorites is the whopper about America
having been founded on Christian principles. Our nation was founded not on
Christian principles but on Enlightenment ones. God only entered the picture as
a very minor player, and Jesus Christ was conspicuously absent.
Our Constitution makes no mention whatever of God. The omission was too obvious
to have been anything but deliberate, in spite of Alexander Hamilton's flippant
responses when asked about it: According to one account, he said that the new
nation was not in need of "foreign aid"; according to another, he simply said
"we forgot." But as Hamilton's biographer Ron Chernow points out, Hamilton never
forgot anything important.
In the eighty-five essays that make up The Federalist, God is mentioned only
twice (both times by Madison, who uses the word, as Gore Vidal has remarked, in
the "only Heaven knows" sense). In the Declaration of Independence, He gets two
brief nods: a reference to "the Laws of Nature and Nature's God," and the famous
line about men being "endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights."
More blatant official references to a deity date from long after the founding
period: "In God We Trust" did not appear on our coinage until the Civil War, and
"under God" was introduced into the Pledge of Allegiance during the McCarthy
hysteria in 1954 [see Elisabeth Sifton, "The Battle Over the Pledge," The
Nation, April 5, 2004].
In 1797 our government concluded a "Treaty of Peace and Friendship between the
United States of America and the Bey and Subjects of Tripoli, or Barbary," now
known simply as the Treaty of Tripoli. Article 11 of the treaty contains these
words:
As the Government of the United States...is not in any
sense founded on the Christian religion--as it has in itself no character of
enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity of Musselmen--and as the said
States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan
nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious
opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the
two countries.
This document was endorsed by Secretary of State Timothy Pickering and President
John Adams. It was then sent to the Senate for ratification; the vote was
unanimous. It is worth pointing out that although this was the 339th time a
recorded vote had been required by the Senate, it was only the third unanimous
vote in the Senate's history. There is no record of debate or dissent. The text
of the treaty was printed in full in the Philadelphia Gazette and in two New
York papers, but there were no screams of outrage, as one might expect today.
The Founding Fathers were not religious men, and they fought hard to erect, in
Thomas Jefferson's words, "a wall of separation between church and state." John
Adams opined that if they were not restrained by legal measures, Puritans--the
fundamentalists of their day--would "whip and crop, and pillory and roast." The
historical epoch had afforded these men ample opportunity to observe the
corruption to which established priesthoods were liable, as well as "the impious
presumption of legislators and rulers," as Jefferson wrote, "civil as well as
ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have
assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and
modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavoring to
impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the
greatest part of the world and through all time."
If we define a Christian as a person who believes in the divinity of Jesus
Christ, then it is safe to say that some of the key Founding Fathers were not
Christians at all. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine were
deists--that is, they believed in one Supreme Being but rejected revelation and
all the supernatural elements of the Christian Church; the word of the Creator,
they believed, could best be read in Nature. John Adams was a professed liberal
Unitarian, but he, too, in his private correspondence seems more deist than
Christian.
George Washington and James Madison also leaned toward deism, although neither
took much interest in religious matters. Madison believed that "religious
bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble
enterprize." He spoke of the "almost fifteen centuries" during which
Christianity had been on trial: "What have been its fruits? More or less in all
places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity,
in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution." If Washington mentioned the
Almighty in a public address, as he occasionally did, he was careful to refer to
Him not as "God" but with some nondenominational moniker like "Great Author" or
"Almighty Being." It is interesting to note that the Father of our Country spoke
no words of a religious nature on his deathbed, although fully aware that he was
dying, and did not ask for a man of God to be present; his last act was to take
his own pulse, the consummate gesture of a creature of the age of scientific
rationalism.
Tom Paine, a polemicist rather than a politician, could afford to be perfectly
honest about his religious beliefs, which were baldly deist in the tradition of
Voltaire: "I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond
this life.... I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by
the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant
church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church." This is
how he opened The Age of Reason, his virulent attack on Christianity. In it he
railed against the "obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and
torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness" of the Old Testament, "a
history of wickedness, that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind." The
New Testament is less brutalizing but more absurd, the story of Christ's divine
genesis a "fable, which for absurdity and extravagance is not exceeded by any
thing that is to be found in the mythology of the ancients." He held the idea of
the Resurrection in especial ridicule: Indeed, "the wretched contrivance with
which this latter part is told, exceeds every thing that went before it." Paine
was careful to contrast the tortuous twists of theology with the pure clarity of
deism. "The true deist has but one Deity; and his religion consists in
contemplating the power, wisdom, and benignity of the Deity in his works, and in
endeavoring to imitate him in every thing moral, scientifical, and mechanical."
Paine's rhetoric was so fervent that he was inevitably branded an atheist. Men
like Franklin, Adams and Jefferson could not risk being tarred with that brush,
and in fact Jefferson got into a good deal of trouble for continuing his
friendship with Paine and entertaining him at Monticello. These statesmen had to
be far more circumspect than the turbulent Paine, yet if we examine their
beliefs it is all but impossible to see just how theirs differed from his.
Franklin was the oldest of the Founding Fathers. He was also the most worldly
and sophisticated, and was well aware of the Machiavellian principle that if one
aspires to influence the masses, one must at least profess religious sentiments.
By his own definition he was a deist, although one French acquaintance claimed
that "our free-thinkers have adroitly sounded him on his religion, and they
maintain that they have discovered he is one of their own, that is that he has
none at all." If he did have a religion, it was strictly utilitarian: As his
biographer Gordon Wood has said, "He praised religion for whatever moral effects
it had, but for little else." Divine revelation, Franklin freely admitted, had
"no weight with me," and the covenant of grace seemed "unintelligible" and "not
beneficial." As for the pious hypocrites who have ever controlled nations, "A
man compounded of law and gospel is able to cheat a whole country with his
religion and then destroy them under color of law"--a comment we should
carefully consider at this turning point in the history of our Republic.
Here is Franklin's considered summary of his own beliefs, in response to a query
by Ezra Stiles, the president of Yale. He wrote it just six weeks before his
death at the age of 84.
Here is my creed. I believe in one God, Creator of the
universe. That he governs it by his providence. That he ought to be worshipped.
That the most acceptable service we render to him is doing good to his other
children. That the soul of Man is immortal, and will be treated with justice in
another life respecting its conduct in this. These I take to be the fundamental
points in all sound religion, and I regard them as you do in whatever sect I
meet with them.
As for Jesus of Nazareth, my opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think
his system of morals and his religion, as he left them to us, the best the world
ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting
changes, and I have, with most of the present dissenters in England, some doubts
as to his divinity; though it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having
never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with now, when I expect
soon an opportunity of knowing the truth with less trouble. I see no harm,
however, in its being believed, if that belief has the good consequence, as it
probably has, of making his doctrines more respected and better observed,
especially as I do not perceive that the Supreme takes it amiss, by
distinguishing the unbelievers in his government of the world with any
particular marks of his displeasure.
Jefferson thoroughly agreed with Franklin on the corruptions the teachings of
Jesus had undergone. "The metaphysical abstractions of Athanasius, and the
maniacal ravings of Calvin, tinctured plentifully with the foggy dreams of
Plato, have so loaded [Christianity] with absurdities and incomprehensibilities"
that it was almost impossible to recapture "its native simplicity and purity."
Like Paine, Jefferson felt that the miracles claimed by the New Testament put an
intolerable strain on credulity. "The day will come," he predicted (wrongly, so
far), "when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father
in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of
Minerva in the brain of Jupiter." The Revelation of St. John he dismissed as
"the ravings of a maniac."
Jefferson edited his own version of the New Testament, "The Life and Morals of
Jesus of Nazareth," in which he carefully deleted all the miraculous passages
from the works of the Evangelists. He intended it, he said, as "a document in
proof that I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of
Jesus." This was clearly a defense against his many enemies, who hoped to
blacken his reputation by comparing him with the vile atheist Paine. His
biographer Joseph Ellis is undoubtedly correct, though, in seeing
disingenuousness here: "If [Jefferson] had been completely scrupulous, he would
have described himself as a deist who admired the ethical teachings of Jesus as
a man rather than as the son of God. (In modern-day parlance, he was a secular
humanist.)" In short, not a Christian at all.
The three accomplishments Jefferson was proudest of--those that he requested be
put on his tombstone--were the founding of the University of Virginia and the
authorship of the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute for
Religious Freedom. The latter was a truly radical document that would eventually
influence the separation of church and state in the US Constitution; when it was
passed by the Virginia legislature in 1786, Jefferson rejoiced that there was
finally "freedom for the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mohammeden,
the Hindu and infidel of every denomination"--note his respect, still unusual
today, for the sensibilities of the "infidel." The University of Virginia was
notable among early-American seats of higher education in that it had no
religious affiliation whatever. Jefferson even banned the teaching of theology
at the school.
If we were to speak of Jefferson in modern political categories, we would have
to admit that he was a pure libertarian, in religious as in other matters. His
real commitment (or lack thereof) to the teachings of Jesus Christ is plain from
a famous throwaway comment he made: "It does me no injury for my neighbor to say
there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."
This raised plenty of hackles when it got about, and Jefferson had to go to some
pains to restore his reputation as a good Christian. But one can only conclude,
with Ellis, that he was no Christian at all.
John Adams, though no more religious than Jefferson, had inherited the
fatalistic mindset of the Puritan culture in which he had grown up. He
personally endorsed the Enlightenment commitment to Reason but did not share
Jefferson's optimism about its future, writing to him, "I wish that Superstition
in Religion exciting Superstition in Polliticks...may never blow up all your
benevolent and phylanthropic Lucubrations," but that "the History of all Ages is
against you." As an old man he observed, "Twenty times in the course of my late
reading have I been upon the point of breaking out, 'This would be the best of
all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!'" Speaking ex cathedra, as
a relic of the founding generation, he expressed his admiration for the Roman
system whereby every man could worship whom, what and how he pleased. When his
young listeners objected that this was paganism, Adams replied that it was
indeed, and laughed.
In their fascinating and eloquent valetudinarian correspondence, Adams and
Jefferson had a great deal to say about religion. Pressed by Jefferson to define
his personal creed, Adams replied that it was "contained in four short words,
'Be just and good.'" Jefferson replied, "The result of our fifty or sixty years
of religious reading, in the four words, 'Be just and good,' is that in which
all our inquiries must end; as the riddles of all priesthoods end in four more,
'ubi panis, ibi deus.' What all agree in, is probably right. What no two agree
in, most probably wrong."
This was a clear reference to Voltaire's Reflections on Religion. As Voltaire
put it:
There are no sects in geometry. One does not speak of a
Euclidean, an Archimedean. When the truth is evident, it is impossible for
parties and factions to arise.... Well, to what dogma do all minds agree? To the
worship of a God, and to honesty. All the philosophers of the world who have had
a religion have said in all ages: "There is a God, and one must be just." There,
then, is the universal religion established in all ages and throughout mankind.
The point in which they all agree is therefore true, and the systems through
which they differ are therefore false.
Of course all these men knew, as all modern presidential candidates know, that
to admit to theological skepticism is political suicide. During Jefferson's
presidency a friend observed him on his way to church, carrying a large prayer
book. "You going to church, Mr. J," remarked the friend. "You do not believe a
word in it." Jefferson didn't exactly deny the charge. "Sir," he replied, "no
nation has ever yet existed or been governed without religion. Nor can be. The
Christian religion is the best religion that has been given to man and I as
chief Magistrate of this nation am bound to give it the sanction of my example.
Good morning Sir."
Like Jefferson, every recent President has understood the necessity of at least
paying lip service to the piety of most American voters. All of our leaders,
Democrat and Republican, have attended church, and have made very sure they are
seen to do so. But there is a difference between offering this gesture of
respect for majority beliefs and manipulating and pandering to the bigotry,
prejudice and millennial fantasies of Christian extremists. Though for public
consumption the Founding Fathers identified themselves as Christians, they were,
at least by today's standards, remarkably honest about their misgivings when it
came to theological doctrine, and religion in general came very low on the list
of their concerns and priorities--always excepting, that is, their determination
to keep the new nation free from bondage to its rule.
- from The Nation,
February 25, 2005
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