Scholars routinely assert that America’s founders were deists who desired the strict separation of church and state. This generalization may be accurate with respect to a handful of founders, but it is palpably false as applied to the founding generation. Our recent book, Faith and the Founders of the American Republic (Oxford, 2014), helps set the record straight and provides a more nuanced account of the founders’ religious commitments and their views on the religious liberty and church-state relations. Moreover, there seems to have been a consensus among the founders, including those most informed by Enlightenment rationalism, that religion and morality were indispensable to their great political experiment in republican self-government. We are pleased to answer questions about these topics throughout the day.
Daniel L. Dreisbach is a professor at American University in Washington, D.C. He received a Doctor of Philosophy degree from Oxford University, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar, and a Juris Doctor degree from the University of Virginia. His research interests include the intersection of religion, politics, and law in American public life. He has authored or edited nine books, including Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation between Church and State (New York University Press, 2002). Professor Dreisbach is a past recipient of American University’s highest faculty award, “Scholar / Teacher of the Year.”
Mark David Hall is Herbert Hoover Distinguished Professor of Politics and Faculty Fellow in the William Penn Honors Program at George Fox University. He has written, edited, or co-edited ten books, including Roger Sherman and the Creation of the American Republic (Oxford, 2013).
They have collaborated or are collaborating on six books: The Founders on God and Government (2004), The Forgotten Founders on Religion and Public Life (2009), The Sacred Rights of Conscience: Selected Readings on Religious Liberty and Church-State Relations in the American Founding (2009), Faith and the Founders of the American Republic (2014), Great Christian Jurists in American History (under contract), and The Godless Constitution, Deist Founders, and other Myths About Religion and the American Founding.
Welcome, Professors! Thank you for sitting for this AMA! I hope you don't mind if I post my questions a bit too early.
Your book title says faith, the AMA title reads religion, and the blurb-comment mentions church. Are these terms interchangeable in early America? Would understanding the difference among them back then help untangle modern misconceptions about the time?
How did morality relate to "religion"--and is it fair to define religion in their eyes specifically as Christianity?
Did the concurrence of multiple Christian traditions (Puritanism, Anglicanism, Catholicism (?), Quakers, perhaps Christian deism) affect how the founders talked about religion, especially in official documents?
Is there any evidence to suggest how the founders' wives did/didn't influence their religious sentiments?
How much stock should I put in Susan Jacoby's history of American secularism, Freethinkers? What about Buckley's Church and State in Revolutionary Virginia? With all that's been written on religion and the American revolutionary period, it's really difficult for me (whose interest and reading usually lies elsewhere) to figure out what the best work is about this period.
The witch craze was less than a century before the drafting of the Declaration of Independence. I've always wondered if the founding fathers were reacting to that sort of religious excess, which captured and controlled governance and the courts to such disastrous effect. There is no question that the founders included people with religious devotion, but have you run into evidence that they were reacting against the memory of recent historical events when they placed barriers between government and religion?
How influential was Christian heterodoxy like Unitarianism and Universalism in shaping the founding generation's views of church/state relations and religion's role in society?
Were any of the Founding Fathers atheists or agnostics? Were either of those really a thing in their society?
Are there any distinct trends of political thought along denominational lines? For example, were members of episcopal churches less inclined towards more direct democracy than congregational churches, or were other social and personal factors more important for that kind of intellectual development?
While the Founders certainly saw religion as an important social structure, would you say that, in the context of your op, it is still incorrect to say that they believed America should be a "Christian" nation as is often claimed?
I've heard it said that many of the men involved in the revolutionary war believed it would usher in the new Millenium of Christ. How true was this, and if it was, did perceptions change after he end of the war?
Hello Good Sirs! Thank you both for being kind enough to do this AMA on a fascinating subject! I have added your book to my reading list! Just a few questions.
It seems that most scholars study religion as a force shaping social trends, what made you interested in exploring the personal faith of Founding Fathers? Something that usually receives only a brief overview in individual biographies.
Why do you suppose the religion of the founders still remains a topic of so much heated discussion on both ends of the political spectrum? Given that myths and misconceptions about the founding generation have been appearing since the 19th century, is this controversy recent?
Can you tell us anything about the attitudes of most founders toward religions held by a small minority of the population? Such as Catholicism or Judaism, often percieved as “foreign”. What about their attitudes toward Islam, or “pagan” religions (such as Hinduism, Buddhism etc;)?
Lastly a topic of personal curiosity that might not be perhaps fully within the scope of your research, what were the attitudes of the founders toward missionaries who attempted to convert Native Americans?
Did the early Supreme Court, when making decisions based on the principle, ever go ahead and just ask living members of the Founding Fathers what they meant by separation of Church and State while that generation was still alive?
Do you think that if the religious sentiment in America had been more intense or traditional than it was, would this have influenced in any way either positively or negatively to embrace the new ideals of the constitution, as opposed to, say, the possibility of monarchy?
And, on a more personal note, your career is very distinguished as an academic. Having participated in this career path I am sincerely curious, does your success bring you happiness or satisfaction to some extent in life? Or does it just feel like the next step in your path, same as any other step?
Were there any people some might call founding fathers that wanted to establish a state religion? Did they make any kind of attempts?
Why did the founders believe "that religion and morality were indispensable to their great political experiment in republican self-government"? Looking back, over the 150 years or so of thinking on ethics, morality, and world religions, that smells incorrect; the only religion the vast majority of them knew was Christianity.
I have heard that a motivation for separation of church and state in the founding of Rhode Island as a colony was the founders' desires to keep the state's influence out of the church. This is reversed from how most people think about separation of church and state in the 21st century. Did the founders of the US consider this direction of influence when forming the Bill of Rights?