Secular Europe, religious America

Public Interest, Spring, 2004 by Brian C. Anderson

  The Constitution was ordained and established to secure liberty and
  its blessings, not to promote faith in God. Officially, religion was
  subordinate to liberty and it was to be fostered only with a view to
  securing liberty.

This view obviously captures important truths about the American polity: The Framers drew much insight from Locke and, more broadly, from the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment, and they certainly wanted to avoid the religious strife that Europe had suffered. But it also neglects the degree to which a religious consciousness pervaded the Founding era. Recent books and essays by Daniel Dreisbach, James Hutson, Philip Hamburger, Michael Novak, and others have helpfully redressed this imbalance. "The leaders of the American Revolution were not, like the leaders of the French Revolution, secularists," Novak writes in his 2002 book On Two Wings. "They did not set out to erase religion."

On the contrary: The very first act of the First Continental Congress in 1774, Novak reminds us, was an official prayer--a Psalm read aloud to the congressmen by an Episcopal clergyman. The Declaration of Independence, he notes, takes the form of a traditional American prayer not all that different from the Mayflower Compact, speaking of God in four ways--Creator (the source of our "unalienable rights"), Judge, Lawgiver, and Providence--that are, with the exception of Lawgiver, unambiguously biblical. Early American political debates made frequent use of biblical references and language. One scholar, Donald Lutz, surveyed 3,154 citations made by the Founders and discovered that more than one-third of them were to the Bible. (Montesquieu and Blackstone followed with 300 or so each, while Locke trailed far behind.)

As Tocqueville emphasized, religion and democracy "reigned together" in America long before 1776. The colonies, populated by deeply devout religious dissenters, had nourished vibrant republican traditions. More to the point, unlike in Europe, where religion took the side of the established authorities in opposition to democracy, America's Puritan pulpits helped to ignite the American Revolution itself. John Adams extolled the Philadelphia ministers who "thunder and lighten every Sabbath" against George III's tyranny. "To the Pulpit, the Puritan Pulpit, we owe the moral force which won our independence," said John Wingate Thornton.

For the Founders, religion did more than help the nation win independence. Successful self-government required moral virtues--self-control, self-reliance, and a disinterested concern for the commonweal--that only religion could provide, at least for the majority. (Some refined souls, with minds of "peculiar structure," President George Washington conceded, could be moral without this aid.) Washington's Farewell Address praised religion as the "indispensable" support of the "dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity." Benjamin Rush agreed:

   The only foundation for a useful education in a republic is to be
   laid in religion. Without it there can be no virtue, and without
   virtue there can be no liberty, and liberty is the object and life of
   all republican governments.