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The New American Nation: Christian, Secular, or What?

William and Mary historian Christopher Grasso has an excellent roundup [subscription] of recent writing on the role of faith and skepticism in the new American nation, in the most recent Journal of the Early Republic. In it, he contrasts my book God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution with several others, including Matthew Stewart’s Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic. Here’s an excerpt:

The Revolutionary era has been a flashpoint in discussions about the religious or secular character of the United States. On one hand, historians have argued that ‘‘the Revolution was a profoundly secular event,’’ and about ‘‘the intentionally secular base on which the Constitution was placed.’’ On the other, scholars continue to produce books on the Revolution as ‘‘a war of religion,’’ and on ‘‘faith and the Founders.’’ Answers to questions about the relation of religion to the Revolution arise in part from how ‘‘religion’’ and ‘‘the Revolution’’ are defined at the outset.

Two recent studies—Thomas S. Kidd’s God of Liberty and Matthew Stewart’s Nature’s God— framed the issue in vastly different ways and came to nearly opposing views of the religious or secular character of the era. Kidd commented on ‘‘the folly of trying to separate the sources of revolutionary ideology into ‘secular’ or ‘religious’ categories.’’ But thirteen pages later he argued that ‘‘the evangelical tradition supplied spiritual propulsion to the Patriot cause that was unsurpassed by any other element of Patriot ideology.’’ It is religion that matters for Kidd: ‘‘religion, both during the Revolution and afterward, provided essential moral and political principles to the revolutionaries and forged the new American nation.’’ And it is religion in a fairly conventionally Christian sense…

Whereas Kidd stressed the power of evangelicals, the public language of compromise, and a resulting American public religion that would continue to have much in common with its Christian roots, Stewart’s Nature’s God looked to deists, the inner logic of radical philosophy, and the resulting rise of secularism. Like Kidd, Stewart described a late eighteenth-century tactical alliance between deists and evangelicals, but that alliance worked—and worked out—differently: ‘‘In America, the religious enthusiasts played an especially critical role in the establishment of a secular republic. . . . The enthusiasts supplied much of the labor for the Revolution, but the infidels provided the ideas.’’

Central ‘‘to any credible explanation of the revolutionary dimension of the American Revolution,’’ Stewart argued, is a radical Epicurean philosophy revived by Spinoza and smuggled into Anglo–American discussion by Locke. Though often labeled ‘‘deism,’’ we might better understand this wide ranging intellectual tradition as pantheism, ‘‘and pantheism is really just a pretty word for atheism.’’ The ‘‘Nature’s God’’ that was ‘‘the presiding deity of the American Revolution’’ and that was invoked in the Declaration of Independence ‘‘refers to nothing that we commonly mean by the term ‘God,’ but rather to something closer to ‘Nature.’ ’

Going on to discuss several other recent books on faith and doubt in the early republic, Grasso concludes this section by noting that our “conclusions differ; each author uses different methods and employs different definitions of the key terms and historical sources. As each discusses texts or discourse or minds or ideas, they employ varying notions of the secular and the religious. Can we term deism a religion or a philosophy? Was the overall mood of the early American republic riddled with doubt or united by a set of public faiths? Scrutinizing the ways scholars in our field have used the concepts of the religious and the secular illustrate vividly the stakes of those choices and the definitions we employ in our historical analyses.

It is fascinating to see how other academic historians perceive my role in debates over faith and the American Revolution. Here, I am positioned as the arch-defender of traditional faith’s role, and in the context of academic debates, I have no problem with that characterization.

But in popular Christian debates over religion’s role in the Revolution, I am sometimes classed as a skeptic, because I do not try to portray Founders such as Jefferson or Franklin as devout believers. Yet another instance of how much your perspective matters in the interpretation of history!

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