Book Review : Hospitable to Church-State Separation

Faith of Our Fathers: Religion and the New Nation by Edwin S. Gaustad (Harper & Row: $15.95, 176 pages)

Exactly how revolutionary were the fathers of the American Revolution? After all, they were, by and large, an intellectual and political aristocracy of powerful men who managed to invent the American democracy without cutting off heads, expropriating land or money, throwing open the prisons, or freeing slaves--indeed, many of the Founders were slave-holding plantation owners, before and after the Revolution. But, as we are reminded in Edwin S. Gaustad’s extended essay, “Faith of Our Fathers,” the Founding Fathers were genuine radicals on at least one subject--the utter rejection of the ancient and universal bond between church and state, and the struggle for religious and political freedom.

The First Amendment, which embodies this most revolutionary doctrine of the Founding Fathers, is all the more surprising when we reflect on the dominance of the church, both Congregational and Anglican, in the early colonies, when public whippings and even expulsion were used to punish religious dissenters. “The truths that were self-evident to Thomas Jefferson were far from self-evident to the churchmen and statesmen of an earlier age,” Gaustad points out. “On the contrary, what was self-evident to the vast majority of the colonists and their leaders (religious or political) was that society survived only as church and state worked and worshiped together.”

Diverse Religious Groups

But America turned out to be hospitable to notions of religious diversity--Gaustad points out that the primacy of Congregational and Anglican churches was soon challenged by “an unbelievable hodgepodge of religious groups,” ranging from Catholics to Quakers, Mennonites, Brethren and Schwenkfelders. By the mid-17th Century, the cutting edge of revolutionary thought and action was brought to bear on the cause of religious freedom. But it would take the revolutionary fervor of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, the Solomon-like wisdom of Franklin, and the serene helmsmanship of Washington, to “bring down alliances of church and state” and to “nudge a reluctant world away from its bloodied soil of persecution toward a higher ground where all consciences might be free.”

(Significantly, I must clarify the authorship of the phrases just quoted--they are Gaustad’s, not Jefferson’s. The author, a distinguished religious historian and a professor of history at the Riverside campus of the University of California, is a gifted phrasemaker with a neo-classical air, and “Faith of Our Fathers” is a pleasurable example of the traditional essay at its wittiest and most persuasive.)

The radicals, according to Gaustad, were Jefferson and Madison, who “came to understand much of western European history as needlessly besmirched and tragically bloodied by the heavy hand of despotic religion.” Jefferson, of course, is familiar to us as a coy deist whose early advocacy of religious freedom (“It does me no injury for my neighbor to say that there are twenty gods, or no God”) obscured his passionate hatred of formal religion: Jefferson denied the divinity of Jesus, detested what he saw as the indolence and hypocrisy of the clergy, and regarded the church as a corrupted form of Christianity that had become “an engine for enslaving mankind.”

Theorist of Democracy

More surprising, perhaps, is the role that Madison played in giving the force of law to these ideas. Madison, the elegant theorist of democracy who was also an expert parliamentary in-fighter, fought the impulse toward a state religion in the newborn democracy--when Patrick Henry put forward a bill in the Virginia legislature to declare Christianity “the established Religion of this Commonwealth,” it was Madison who “must be credited for the defeat of an idea whose time had very nearly come.”

The adoption of the Bill of Rights and its spare proclamation of religious freedom (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”) can be seen as a triumph of the most revolutionary sentiments. “Both Jefferson and Madison, throughout the remainder of their lives, in office and out, endeavored to give those 16 words the soundest, sternest construction they could bear.”

Even Franklin and Washington, who were later canonized as not-so-secular saints of the new American nation, distrusted and downplayed orthodoxy and organized religion and “the only ‘ism’ that troubled him,” Gaustad writes of Benjamin Franklin, “was rheumatism.” Near the end of his life, Franklin conceded that he, too, doubted the divinity of Jesus, “tho’ it is a Question I do not dogmatize upon.”

Washington was less forthcoming about matters of faith, and often referred to the providence of “the Grand Architect” in the fate of the American nation, but Gaustad suggests that his “cool deism” can hardly be distinguished in broad outline from that of Jefferson.

Gaustad reflects on the bitterness and befuddlement of religious discourse in our own times--”We are paralyzed by its complexity and confusion,” he writes, “its bewildering assemblage of options and decisions”--and he suggests that a backward glance at our own history offers a cure for the paralysis of public will. “The half century between the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the deaths of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams in 1826 were years of momentous option and crucial decision,” Gaustad writes, rising again to nearly Jeffersonian heights of rhetoric. “Understanding those decisions . . . might even restore our confidence, nerving us for the realization that we too have it in our power to reshape or redeem the land.”