Our Godless Constitution
by BROOKE ALLEN
[from the February 21, 2005 issue]
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050221&s=allen
It is hard to believe that George Bush has ever read the works of George
Orwell, but he seems, somehow, to have grasped a few Orwellian precepts.
The lesson the President has learned best--and certainly the one that
has been the most useful to him--is the axiom that if you repeat a lie
often enough, people will believe it. One of his Administration's
current favorites is the whopper about America having been founded on
Christian principles. Our nation was founded not on Christian principles
but on Enlightenment ones. God only entered the picture as a very minor
player, and Jesus Christ was conspicuously absent.
Our Constitution makes no mention whatever of God. The omission was too
obvious to have been anything but deliberate, in spite of Alexander
Hamilton's flippant responses when asked about it: According to one
account, he said that the new nation was not in need of "foreign aid";
according to another, he simply said "we forgot." But as Hamilton's
biographer Ron Chernow points out, Hamilton never forgot anything
important.
In the eighty-five essays that make up The Federalist, God is mentioned
only twice (both times by Madison, who uses the word, as Gore Vidal has
remarked, in the "only Heaven knows" sense). In the Declaration of
Independence, He gets two brief nods: a reference to "the Laws of Nature
and Nature's God," and the famous line about men being "endowed by their
Creator with certain inalienable rights." More blatant official
references to a deity date from long after the founding period: "In God
We Trust" did not appear on our coinage until the Civil War, and
"under God" was introduced into the Pledge of Allegiance during the
McCarthy hysteria in 1954 [see Elisabeth Sifton, "The Battle Over the
Pledge," April 5, 2004].
In 1797 our government concluded a "Treaty of Peace and Friendship
between the United States of America and the Bey and Subjects of
Tripoli, or Barbary," now known simply as the Treaty of Tripoli. Article
11 of the treaty contains these words:
"As the Government of the United States...is not in any sense founded on
the Christian religion--as it has in itself no character of enmity
against the laws, religion, or tranquillity of Musselmen--and as the
said States never have
entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation,
it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious
opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing
between the two countries."
This document was endorsed by Secretary of State Timothy Pickering and
President John Adams. It was then sent to the Senate for ratification;
the vote was unanimous. It is worth pointing out that although this was
the 339th time a recorded vote had been required by the Senate, it was
only the third unanimous vote in the Senate's history. There is no
record of debate or dissent. The text of the treaty was printed in full
in the Philadelphia Gazette and in two New York papers, but there were
no screams of outrage, as one might expect today.
The Founding Fathers were not religious men, and they fought hard to
erect, in Thomas Jefferson's words, "a wall of separation between church
and state." John Adams opined that if they were not restrained by legal
measures, Puritans--the fundamentalists of their day--would "whip and
crop, and pillory and roast." The historical epoch had afforded these
men ample opportunity to observe the
corruption to which established priesthoods were liable, as well as "the
impious
presumption of legislators and rulers," as Jefferson wrote, "civil as
well as
ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men,
have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own
opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as
such endeavoring to impose them on others, hath established and
maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and
through all time."
If we define a Christian as a person who believes in the divinity of
Jesus Christ, then it is safe to say that some of the key Founding
Fathers were not Christians at all. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson
and Tom Paine were deists--that is, they believed in one Supreme Being
but rejected revelation and all the supernatural elements of the
Christian Church; the word of the Creator, they believed, could best be
read in Nature. John Adams was a professed liberal Unitarian, but he,
too, in his private correspondence seems more deist than
Christian.
George Washington and James Madison also leaned toward deism, although
neither took much interest in religious matters. Madison believed that
"religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for
every noble
enterprize." He spoke of the "almost fifteen centuries" during which
Christianity had been on trial: "What have been its fruits? More or less
in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and
servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry, and
persecution." If Washington mentioned the Almighty in a public address,
as he occasionally did, he was careful to refer to Him not as "God" but
with some nondenominational moniker like "Great Author" or "Almighty
Being." It is interesting to note that the Father of our Country spoke
no words of a religious nature on his deathbed, although fully aware
that he was dying, and did not ask for a man of God to be present; his
last act was to take his own pulse, the consummate gesture of a creature
of the age of scientific rationalism.
Tom Paine, a polemicist rather than a politician, could afford to be
perfectly honest about his religious beliefs, which were baldly deist in
the tradition of Voltaire: "I believe in one God, and no more; and I
hope for happiness beyond this life.... I do not believe in the creed
professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek
church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any
church that I know of. My own mind is my own church." This is how he
opened The Age of Reason, his virulent attack on Christianity. In it he
railed against the "obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the
cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness" of the
Old Testament, "a history of wickedness, that has served to corrupt and
brutalize mankind." The New Testament is less brutalizing but more
absurd, the story of Christ's divine genesis a "fable, which for
absurdity and extravagance is not exceeded by any thing that is to be
found in the mythology of the ancients." He held the idea of the
Resurrection in especial ridicule: Indeed, "the wretched contrivance
with
which this latter part is told, exceeds every thing that went before
it." Paine was careful to contrast the tortuous twists of theology with
the pure clarity of deism. "The true deist has but one Deity; and his
religion consists in contemplating the power, wisdom, and benignity of
the Deity in his works, and in endeavoring to imitate him in every thing
moral, scientifical, and mechanical."
Paine's rhetoric was so fervent that he was inevitably branded an
atheist. Men like Franklin, Adams and Jefferson could not risk being
tarred with that brush, and in fact Jefferson got into a good deal of
trouble for continuing his
friendship with Paine and entertaining him at Monticello. These
statesmen had to be far more circumspect than the turbulent Paine, yet
if we examine their beliefs it is all but impossible to see just how
theirs differed from his.
Franklin was the oldest of the Founding Fathers. He was also the most
worldly and sophisticated, and was well aware of the Machiavellian
principle that if one aspires to influence the masses, one must at least
profess religious sentiments. By his own definition he was a deist,
although one French acquaintance claimed that "our free-thinkers have
adroitly sounded him on his religion, and they maintain that they have
discovered he is one of their own, that is that he has none at all." If
he did have a religion, it was strictly utilitarian: As his
biographer Gordon Wood has said, "He praised religion for whatever moral
effects it had, but for little else." Divine revelation, Franklin freely
admitted, had "no weight with me," and the covenant of grace seemed
"unintelligible" and "not beneficial." As for the pious hypocrites who
have ever controlled nations, "A man compounded of law and gospel is
able to cheat a whole country with his religion and then destroy them
under color of law"--a comment we should carefully consider at this
turning point in the history of our Republic.
Here is Franklin's considered summary of his own beliefs, in response to
a query by Ezra Stiles, the president of Yale. He wrote it just six
weeks before his death at the age of 84.
"Here is my creed. I believe in one God, Creator of the universe. That
he governs it by his providence. That he ought to be worshipped. That
the most acceptable service we render to him is doing good to his other
children. That the soul of Man is immortal, and will be treated with
justice in another life
respecting its conduct in this. These I take to be the fundamental
points in all sound religion, and I regard them as you do in whatever
sect I meet with them.
"As for Jesus of Nazareth, my opinion of whom you particularly desire, I
think his system of morals and his religion, as he left them to us, the
best the world ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has
received various corrupting changes, and I have, with most of the
present dissenters in England, some doubts
as to his divinity; though it is a question I do not dogmatize upon,
having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with now,
when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the truth with less
trouble. I see no harm, however, in its being believed, if that belief
has the good consequence, as it probably has, of making his doctrines
more respected and better observed,
especially as I do not perceive that the Supreme takes it amiss, by
distinguishing the unbelievers in his government of the world with any
particular marks of his displeasure."
Jefferson thoroughly agreed with Franklin on the corruptions the
teachings of Jesus had undergone. "The metaphysical abstractions of
Athanasius, and the maniacal ravings of Calvin, tinctured plentifully
with the foggy dreams of
Plato, have so loaded [Christianity] with absurdities and
incomprehensibilities" that it was almost impossible to recapture "its
native simplicity and purity." Like Paine, Jefferson felt that the
miracles claimed by the New Testament put an intolerable strain on
credulity. "The day will come," he predicted (wrongly, so
far), "when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as
his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of
the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter." The Revelation of
St. John he dismissed as
"the ravings of a maniac."
Jefferson edited his own version of the New Testament, "The Life and
Morals of Jesus of Nazareth," in which he carefully deleted all the
miraculous passages from the works of the Evangelists. He intended it,
he said, as "a document in proof that I am a real Christian, that is to
say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus." This was clearly a defense
against his many enemies, who hoped to blacken his reputation by
comparing him with the vile atheist Paine. His biographer Joseph Ellis
is undoubtedly correct, though, in seeing
disingenuousness here: "If [Jefferson] had been completely scrupulous,
he would have described himself as a deist who admired the ethical
teachings of Jesus as a man rather than as the son of God. (In
modern-day parlance, he was a secular humanist.)" In short, not a
Christian at all.
The three accomplishments Jefferson was proudest of--those that he
requested be put on his tombstone--were the founding of the University
of Virginia and the authorship of the Declaration of Independence and
the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. The latter was a truly
radical document that would eventually
influence the separation of church and state in the US Constitution;
when it was passed by the Virginia legislature in 1786, Jefferson
rejoiced that there was finally "freedom for the Jew and the Gentile,
the Christian and the Mohammeden, the Hindu and infidel of every
denomination"--note his respect, still unusual
today, for the sensibilities of the "infidel." The University of
Virginia was notable among early-American seats of higher education in
that it had no religious affiliation whatever. Jefferson even banned the
teaching of theology at the school.
If we were to speak of Jefferson in modern political categories, we
would have to admit that he was a pure libertarian, in religious as in
other matters. His real commitment (or lack thereof) to the teachings of
Jesus Christ is plain from a famous throwaway comment he made: "It does
me no injury for my neighbor to say
there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks
my leg." This raised plenty of hackles when it got about, and Jefferson
had to go to some pains to restore his reputation as a good Christian.
But one can only conclude, with Ellis, that he was no Christian at all.
John Adams, though no more religious than Jefferson, had inherited the
fatalistic mindset of the Puritan culture in which he had grown up. He
personally endorsed the Enlightenment commitment to Reason but did not
share
Jefferson's optimism about its future, writing to him, "I wish that
Superstition in Religion exciting Superstition in Polliticks...may never
blow up all your benevolent and phylanthropic Lucubrations," but that
"the History of all Ages is against you." As an old man he observed,
"Twenty times in the course of my late reading have I been upon the
point of breaking out, 'This would be the best of all possible worlds,
if there were no religion in it!'" Speaking ex cathedra, as a relic of
the founding generation, he expressed his admiration for the Roman
system whereby every man could worship whom, what and how he pleased.
When his
young listeners objected that this was paganism, Adams replied that it
was indeed, and laughed.
In their fascinating and eloquent valetudinarian correspondence, Adams
and Jefferson had a great deal to say about religion. Pressed by
Jefferson to define his personal creed, Adams replied that it was
"contained in four short words, 'Be just and good.'" Jefferson replied,
"The result of our fifty or sixty years of religious reading, in the
four words, 'Be just and good,' is that in which all our inquiries must
end; as the riddles of all priesthoods end in four more, 'ubi panis, ibi
deus.' What all agree in, is probably right. What no two agree in, most
probably wrong."
This was a clear reference to Voltaire's Reflections on Religion. As
Voltaire put it:
"There are no sects in geometry. One does not speak of a Euclidean, an
Archimedean. When the truth is evident, it is impossible for parties and
factions to arise.... Well, to what dogma do all minds agree? To the
worship of a God, and to honesty. All the philosophers of the world who
have had a religion have said in all ages: "There is a God, and one must
be just." There, then, is the universal religion established in all ages
and throughout mankind. The point in which they all agree is therefore
true, and the systems through which they differ are therefore false."
Of course all these men knew, as all modern presidential candidates
know, that to admit to theological skepticism is political suicide.
During Jefferson's presidency a friend observed him on his way to
church, carrying a large prayer book. "You going to church, Mr. J,"
remarked the friend. "You do not believe a
word in it." Jefferson didn't exactly deny the charge. "Sir," he
replied, "no nation has ever yet existed or been governed without
religion. Nor can be. The Christian religion is the best religion that
has been given to man and I as
chief Magistrate of this nation am bound to give it the sanction of my
example. Good morning Sir."
Like Jefferson, every recent President has understood the necessity of
at least paying lip service to the piety of most American voters. All of
our leaders, Democrat and Republican, have attended church, and have
made very sure they are seen to do so. But there is a difference between
offering this gesture of respect for majority beliefs and manipulating
and pandering to the bigotry, prejudice and millennial fantasies of
Christian extremists. Though for public consumption the Founding Fathers
identified themselves as Christians, they were, at least by today's
standards, remarkably honest about their misgivings when it came to
theological doctrine, and religion in general came very low on the list
of their concerns and priorities--always excepting, that is, their
determination to keep the new nation free from bondage to its rule.