Religion and the New Republic: Faith in the Founding of America

BOOK REVIEWS

Religion and the New Republic: Faith in the Founding of America. By James. S. Hut

son, ed. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000, viii + 213 pp., $22.95 paper.

In the face of supposed cultural decline, Americans often lament the disputed maxim that we have "drifted from our Christian roots." Undisputed is the fact that religious faith, at least some form of it, played a role in the founding of America. The degree to which this faith influenced the founders is often misunderstood and misrepresented. Composed of papers delivered at a Library of Congress symposium in 1998, the essays in Religion and the New Republic examine, from a state and national perspective, the function of religion in the founding period.

Jon Butler, in "Revolutionary America Wasn't a Christian Nation," asserts that roughly a century prior to the American Revolution stark presentations of specifically Protestant Christianity came through an intensification of church/state relationships, revivalism, and denominational growth. Yet, as Butler convincingly argues, by the time of the Revolution roughly 80% of colonial adults were not church members. While the laws of America prompted citizens to Christian virtue, "the law did not measure the Christian commitment of the people" (p. 192).

Locating Christianity and its Jewish roots in the thinking of the Founding Fathers, Michael Novak shows the relationship of liberty to virtue, one that was informed by religious proclivities. He correctly observes that this type of thinking emerged not specifically because the founders were Christians (indeed, most of them were not) but because American society in general was biblically literate and the Founders understood that religion was indispensable to the success of the new republic. A civil society, they believed, rested upon a public virtue (reason), which was to be shaped by religion (revelation). Thus, the "religious and moral habits" of a nation's people will establish its foundation, not the establishment of a national religion. Making these sentiments relevant in our own day, Novak accurately notes the Founders' warning of eminent societal decay should the "nonestablishment of religion" be replaced by the "erasure of religion" in public life altogether.

Mark Noll seeks to establish the historical precedence for modern-day Protestant mobilization in "Evangelicals in the American Founding and Evangelical Political Mobilization Today." Using survey data Noll argues that "evangelicalism turns out to have an interesting, but not overwhelming connection with political choice. By contrast, evangelical convictions that take shape in a conservative Protestant environment have a much stronger political connection" (p. 143). Weary of a pervading "secular America" and an encroaching federal government, Noll correctly notes that evangelicals mobilized in an effort "to reproduce their own culture sheltered from modernizing influences" (p. 145). In a valiant effort to produce a balanced understanding of the past, Noll says "better history" acknowledges that "the founders guidelines for religion and society came out of a situation that was much more theistic than some modern liberals admit, but also out of a situation that was much less explicitly Christian than modern evangelicals with it had been" (p. 154).

Catherine Brekus points out that eighteenth-century women were lauded for their "Zeal, Faith, Purity, Charity, [and] Patience" (p. 118) and far exceeded men in Protestant church membership. Yet, their political activity in ecclesiastical affairs was greatly curtailed. Only dissenting bodies (Baptists, Quakers, Separates) allowed women "gospel liberty" (p. 120). Interestingly, Brekus notes that a woman's "gospel liberty" was composed of "[voting] in church meetings, serv[ing] on church disciplinary committees, choos[ing] new ministers, and speak[ing] as evangelists" (p. 120). Their pious, quiet morality was acknowledged as "the glue that held the republic together" (p. 124). Brekus brilliantly links these sentiments with the impetus for "women's religious activism" that shaped discussions of slavery, children's right, sexual morality, and temperance. These early tremors in American culture paved the way for women's ecclesiastical and political equality to men.

Looking at the political and religious philosophies of James Adams, John Witte, Jr. tells the story of "A Most Mild and Equitable Establishment of Religion" in Massachusetts. Witte's keen observation that Adams would not sanction public funds for congregational ministers allowed Massachusetts delegates to conclude that "no subordination of any one sect or denomination shall ever be established by law" (p. 13). This confirmed Adams's "slender" establishment of public religion which was "tempered" by freedom of conscience. Witte convincingly links this weak structure of public religion to the 1833 ruling that "outlawed the institutional establishment of public religion" (p. 29) in Massachusetts.

Thomas Buckley reveals how church-state discussions in nineteenth-century Virginia factored into the larger national framework. Church-state policy as prescribed by Thomas Jefferson caused heated debate when Methodist deacon Humphry Billups was elected to the [lower] House of Delegates in 1826. Not a minister in any formal sense, Billups was twice denied his elected seat on the grounds that "the foregoing clauses shall not be so construed, as to permit any Minister of the Gospel, or Priest of any denomination, to be eligible to either House of the General Assembly" (p. 45). Buckley persuasively demonstrates how Virginia legislators sometimes took Jefferson out of context to provide support for or antagonism against formal religious establishment. By implication Buckley helps to shape twenty-first century discourse when he notes that the application of church-state issues "has and always will be culturally contextualized" (p. 55).