Rowe on the Founders and Religion

Jon Rowe has an excellent post up about religion and the founding fathers, stemming from a book review at the Claremont website. I very much like the phrase "theistic rationalism", which he quotes the book review as coining. That's an excellent description of the religious views of men like Jefferson, Washington and Franklin. On the religion law listserve a few weeks ago, the question of the founders and deism came up and Eugene Volokh said that he didn't think the language of the Declaration was deistic because deism, by the modern definition, requires a non-intervening God and the language clearly suggested intervention:

"The Great God of the Bible"? "The Father, Son and Holy Ghost"? "The Jehovah"? These would have been odd things to say in even a non-Deistic document. "Divine Providence" and "Supreme Judge of the world" were, I suspect, much more normal and idiomatic ways of referring to the Christian God when discussing his role as an interventionist or judging God. And these phrases suggest that while the Declaration was meant to be an ecumenical document, it wasn't meant to be a Deistic one under the modern definition I give.

I pointed out in reply that the modern definition did not necessarily fit the views of deists in the late 18th century, where there was a range of views:

The problem lies, as I stated before, with the modern definition. The key is not how a dictionary defines it today, but how deists themselves defined it in the 18th century. As I stated previously, in 18th century deism there were two keys to distinguishing between deism and theism in its various forms. First, deists rejected much or all of the claimed revelations upon which the religious were based, Christianity in particular (see Paine's Age of Reason, for instance). Second, deists believed that one could discern the truth about God based upon reason alone, hence there was no need for such revelations. That is a pretty radical difference from the Christian belief that scripture is necessary to know the truth about God. The notion of an entirely non-interventionist clockmaker God was not necessary for deism then, nor is it necessary now. That notion comes more from Spinoza than it does from the various 18th century deists like Voltaire or Paine. So the problem here is in the definition, not the document itself.

Jon expands on this point a bit and quotes Russell Kirk, an opponent of deism, on the question of what deism meant in that day:

Regarding deism and interventionism, it depends on how one defines "deism"; yes there was a strand of strict capital D Deism that posited a God that absolutely did not intervene. And very few of our founders fit this definition. However, there is a broader understanding of deism as well. As Russell Kirk wrote in Roots of the American Order:

Deism was neither a Christian schism nor a systematic philosophy, but rather a way of looking at the human condition; the men called Deists differed among themselves on many points. Deism was an outgrowth of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century scientific speculation. The Deist professed belief in a single Supreme Being, but rejected a large part of Christian doctrine. Follow Nature, said the Deists (as the Stoics had said before them), not Revelation: all things must be tested by private rational judgment.

This seems to be entirely consistent with what Frazer terms, "theistic rationalism." I'm not sure what to call it: deism, unitarianism, theistic rationalism, but it seems to be the baseline of our founders' natural religion that dovetails with our founding political principles or "the laws of nature and nature's God."

It of course must be said that this was not true of all of the founders, but only a portion of them. It is certainly a good description of the views of the leading lights, including Franklin, Washington, Adams and Jefferson.

More like this

Thanks. I checked out some of that religion thread of which are a member; I wish Volokh would blog about these things more often. If he did, though, he'd get a lot more emails (and cites) from me!

It was also interesting to see his interactions with Paul Finkleman. I saw Finkleman speak at a 14th Am. symposium at Temple U's law school. His leftist demagoguery on racial matters really turned me off.

It's interesting though how the lefties who want to debunk America's founding, like Finkleman and the anti-liberal, i.e., Borkian right fundamentally agree on our founding: We were founded on our compromises with our liberal principles, not on our liberal ideals. That's why Finkleman at the symposium asserted that the US Constitution of 1789 was a "pro-slavery" document, that we were founded on "slavery."

I also found interesting Volokh's notion that the Declaration's "public meaning", i.e., the views that the majority of ordinary Christians attached to the document, was that it was a Christian document, that the populace understood nature's God to be the God of the Bible.

He may be right. Walter Berns gets into this on his chapter on religion in Making Patriots (and I'm sure in other places as well).

Doctrinally, nature's God arguably IS NOT the God of the Bible. The God of the Bible IS NOT an unalienable rights granting God, but rather a duty giving, commandment giving God. And Locke's state of nature teaching is "wholly alient to the Bible," in the words of Leo Strauss. Yet, where America's populace contained a great deal of orthodox Christians, our Founders had to convince them that their religion, properly understood, was compatible with the notion of an unalienable rights granting nature's God, and the right to worship as one pleases, and the rest of liberal democracy.

Therefore, if our Founders could get the orthodox Christians in the populace to accept that their Biblical God had the attributes of Nature's God, then we could secure their consent, which was necessary according to liberal democratic theory.

Vic, every time you send me an article from Men's News Daily, it's some ridiculous screed written by a religious right hack like Tremoglie. I hope it's not all like that. That article is just horrible, just one logical fallacy after another. I'll probably have a go at fisking it tomorrow after I return.

Mens news daily has turned into a republican rag that really cares little for men a good number of us had a blow up with Mike Lasalle at mens news daily over it

By Vic Vanity (not verified) on 12 Jan 2005 #permalink