By Allen C. Guelzo, Ph.D., Gettysburg College
The Founders sought, as men of Enlightenment, a natural order in politics. The centuries-old accretion of classes, orders, nobles, and kings struck them as unnatural and unreasonable. But a republic did not flow into motion in quite the same way as gravity; remove the old glue of patronage and hierarchy that held together monarchies, and what was to be applied in its place?
Character and Spirit of Republican People
John Locke had suggested a little too simplistically that self-interest and self-preservation would compel people to cooperate. But societies cannot be built only on the self-serving impulse to cooperate; self-interest, after all, can lead people in very different directions from cooperation.
The character and spirit of a republican people could be preserved, it was held, only if they were persuaded to practice public virtue—industry, temperance, frugality, simplicity, self-denial for the common good.
America, wrote John Adams in his diary in 1765, seems to believe that it “was designed by Providence for the theatre on which man was to make his true figure, on which science, virtue, liberty, happiness, and glory were to exist in peace.”
Learn more about Americans at the end of the 18th century.
Liberty and Virtue
Liberty, Adams wrote in his Novanglus essays in 1775, “can no more exist without virtue and independence than the body can live and move without a soul.”
Without virtue, Madison had warned the Virginia ratifying convention, “we are in a wretched condition. No theoretical checks, no form of government, can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people is a chimerical idea.”
To the great chagrin of the Founders, however, virtue did not pop automatically out of the American hat. After the smoke of the Revolution had cleared, the Revolution’s first native-born historian, David Ramsay, discovered that “our morals are more depreciated than our currency”. By 1783, Ramsay was convinced that “This revolution has introduced so much anarchy that it will take half a century to eradicate the licentiousness of the people.”
This is a transcript from the video series America’s Founding Fathers. Watch it now, on Wondrium.
Virtue and Religion
George Washington thought he knew what formed and shaped virtue, and that was religion.
But Washington was not himself what we might call a sterling model of piety in word or deed. Jefferson suspected him of infidelity, although this is probably a Jeffersonian overstatement. Washington was a practicing Episcopalian, baptized as such two months after his birth. He attended Christ Church, Alexandria, and probably believed in a God who maintained some sort of active control of human affairs. But more than that, Washington was too reticent to reveal.
Bear in mind, though, that there were not lacking a number among the Founders who would have been happy to offer more fervent religious credentials, and who expected religion to play a larger role in the formation of America’s republican virtue.
Forming America’s Republican Virtue
Roger Sherman, who had represented Connecticut in the Constitutional Convention, was a serious convert to the same evangelical Awakeners who had played so large a role in Patrick Henry’s life. He subscribed to the full menu of Puritan Calvinism, that humanity is born into “a state of depravity, guilt, and misery, exposed to the eternal curse of the law; dead in trespass and sins; by nature prone to evil and adverse to good, and unable to deliver ourselves.”
Although the federal constitution’s first amendment forbade the federal government from designating any denomination as a national church, Sherman saw no contradiction between the federal ban and Connecticut’s own public designation of the Congregational Church as its state religion—an establishment shared by Vermont, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts.
And when Congress debated the amendment in 1789, there was actually a ripple of unease that it might “have a tendency to abolish religion altogether,” or at least be “extremely hurtful to the cause of religion.”
Learn more about the demographics of the early United States.
Evangelical Christianity
Patrick Henry was anxious, too, about ensuring a role for evangelical Christianity in public life.
The publication of Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason in 1794 popularized what in England was known as deism—the minimal belief “in one God, and no more,” a hope “for happiness beyond this life,” and “the equality of man.”
This deism infuriated Henry. “The view which the rising greatness of our country presents to my eyes is greatly tarnished by the general prevalence of deism; which, with me, is but another name for vice and depravity.” Henry thought “religion of infinitely higher importance than politics. My being a Christian is a character which I prize far above all this world has or can boast.”
It was the evangelical Awakeners who, after the Tories, lost the most in the Revolution’s outcome. “Perhaps no set of men, whose hearts were so thoroughly engaged in it, or who contributed in so great a degree to its success,” wrote Peter Thacher, a Massachusetts parson, in 1783, “have suffered more by it.”
Learn more about John Adam’s catastrophic blunders.
Funding for Churches
New Jersey and North Carolina eliminated all state funding for churches in 1776, and New York followed suit in 1777. By 1790, membership in evangelical churches founded during the Great Awakening—the Baptists, the Presbyterians—had waned to as little as 14 percent of the white population.
In Virginia, Thomas Jefferson, during his term as governor of revolutionary Virginia, withdrew state funding for the two professorships in divinity at the College of William and Mary; he saw no connection at all between religion and virtue.
In 1785, Madison went a step further and persuaded the Virginia legislature to drop all public funding for religion. And although the First Amendment was crafted by Madison to prevent the federal government from making any “law respecting an establishment of religion,” Madison had a much more expansive notion of what no establishment meant than Roger Sherman.
He had opposed, in the Confederation Congress, a plan to set aside public lands for the support of religion in the Northwest Ordinance. Madison also opposed counting ministers, as ministers, on the Federal census, lest this lead the government into the business of “ascertaining who, and who are not ministers of the gospel”; he went on to oppose the hiring of chaplains for Congress and for the American military; and urged Congress to tax church property.
Common Questions about Religion and Virtue in American Republic
The character and spirit of a republican people could be preserved, it was held, only if they were persuaded to practice public virtue—industry, temperance, frugality, simplicity, self-denial for the common good.
George Washington thought that religion formed and shaped virtue.
Deism was the minimal belief “in one God, and no more,” a hope “for happiness beyond this life,” and “the equality of man”.
