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.