The Founding Fathers and the Debate Over Religion in Revolutionary America

Paul Harvey

Several times on this blog we've discussed and reviewed John Fea's Was America Founded as a Christian Nation: A Historical Introduction. I'm presently using this in a class, to excellent results, as the students are very engaged with the material (and curious about the author!). Ed Blum's post on using the book in his Historiography course produced a series of blog comments which suggests that he must have had a vigorous class discussion coming out of the work.

Here's a very new primary source volume which should serve many as an eminently usable accompaniment for those wanting to dig into this era further or do a "compare the historian's work to the original sources" kind of exercise: Thomas Kidd and Matthew Harris, eds., The Founding Fathers and the Debate Over Religion in Revolutionary America, just published with Oxford. Click on the link and it will take you to the Amazon page for the book, where you can go through the table of contents and see if the work is right for your class.

Even better might be combining this collection of documents with students searching out those from the kinds of revolutionary Americans discussed by Gary Nash in The Unknown American Revolution or some similar text which incorporates voices reaching beyond "the founders." Ed's students discuss precisely this point in their comments on his post (linked above).

The editors include a number of the old standbys on the subject (Jefferson's Danbury letter, the Treaty of Tripoli, various fast day proclamations, and some of the Founders' musings on the subject) as well as some other material less frequently invoked (some state constitutions, the Northwest Ordinance, and some others). Below is a bit more about the book from its website; it looks like a good bet to be a classroom staple for those who teach in this era, much as is Kidd's volume with Bedford books The Great Awakening: A Brief History with Documents, which I used to excellent results last summer in leading a group of K-12 educators in a Teaching American History program in thinking about how to integrate religion in their American history lesson plans.

Whether America was founded as a Christian nation or as a secular republic is one of the most fiercely debated questions in American history. Historians Matthew Harris and Thomas Kidd offer an authoritative examination of the essential documents needed to understand this debate. The texts included in this volume - writings and speeches from both well-known and obscure early American thinkers - show that religion played a prominent yet fractious role in the era of the American Revolution.

In their personal beliefs, the Founders ranged from profound skeptics like Thomas Paine to traditional Christians like Patrick Henry. Nevertheless, most of the Founding Fathers rallied around certain crucial religious principles, including the idea that people were "created" equal, the belief that religious freedom required the disestablishment of state-backed denominations, the necessity of virtue in a republic, and the role of Providence in guiding the affairs of nations. Harris and Kidd show that through the struggles of war and the framing of the Constitution, Americans sought to reconcile their dedication to religious vitality with their commitment to religious freedom.

Woman in the Wilderness: Letters of Harriet Wood Wheeler

Paul Harvey

Here's a very nice primary source book for your collection or for your university library, that adds much to the literature on nineteenth-century missionaries, especially female missionaries, and white-Native interactions: Nancy Bunge, ed., Woman in the Wilderness: Letters of Harriet Wood Wheeler, Missionary Wife, 1832-1892.

In this volume, Bunge has collected the most significant letters and writings of a missionary and her family, who worked among the Ojibwe from the 1840s through the 1860s, including during the period of the removal of the Ojibwe from their lands in northern Wisconsin; the collection also includes a newspaper article from Julia Wheeler in 1862 which condemns government policy for leading to the 1862 Sioux uprising in Minnesota, which culminated in the hangings of 38 Sioux in December 1862. In this volume, Wheeler begins with fairly conventional Protestant attitudes from her home area near Lowell, Massachusetts, but during her years as a "missionary wife" becomes an advocate for her subjects.

The editor, Michigan State University professor Nancy Bunge, discusses the process of collecting the material for this compilation here. The result of her work is a letter collection that allows the reader to watch the evolution of the subject over a quarter century or more, and to understand in a more intimate way the lives and interactions of white and natives on the midwestern frontier.

Surprising or Otherwise Interesting Primary Sources, X: The Radical Right

Randall Stephens

I've just completed reading Darren Dochuk's marvelous new book, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism. (My review of it will appear in Books & Culture.) His account--filled with insight into anti-communist crusaders, anti-New Dealers, Okie and Arkie folk-preachers, suburban warriors, and pro-business conservatives--is as lively as it is illuminating.

One section in particular--dealing with the John Birch Society and all sorts of anti-communist Cassandras from the Eisenhower and Kennedy years--made me wonder about the political divide in the early 1960s and the growing political chasm of today. To make a point about the bigger national trends, Dochuk quotes a passage from a JFK speech on the radical right.

So, here I pair some lines from that speech with the words of the religious right leader Billy James Hargis, an angry Christian cold warrior and baroque conspiracy theorist. An interesting contrast. (I wonder if JFK ever weighed in directly on Hargis?)

Billy James Hargis, The Facts about Communism and Our Churches (Tulsa: Christian Crusade, 1962).

Those who do not believe in the traditional American system of government began efforts many years ago to work through religious groups for destruction of our free enterprise system. One of the most influential ministers in the early days of the drive to change the direction of American Protestant churches was Dr. Walter Rauschenbusch. . . . [Hargis goes on to savage that progressive, early-twentieth century figure.] (127)

The decline of true Christianity, due primarily to years of insidious attacks from within by unbelieving clergymen, is one of a number of reasons for the enthusiastic optimism of communist conspirators in the United States today. . . . (149)

Ministers of the gospel who actively oppose the international communist conspiracy and try to bring to light the facts about its operations, receive complaints periodically concerning their activities on the ground that they are meddling in politics. We have received numerous such complaints verbally and in writing during the years of our fight against this satanic conspiracy to destroy our nation. Many Christian pastors and laymen have been convinced that it is wrong for Christians to expose or oppose the communist conspiracy in any way. (212)

John F. Kennedy, Hollywood Palladium, November 18, 1961.

In the most critical periods of our nation's history, there have always been those fringes of our society who have sought to escape their own responsibility by finding a simple solution, an appealing slogan, or a convenient scapegoat.

Financial crises could be explained by the presence of too many immigrants or too few greenbacks.

War could be attributed to munitions makers or international bankers.

Peace conferences failed because we were duped by the British or tricked by the French or deceived by the Russians. . . .

Now we are face to face once again with a period of heightened peril. The risks are great, the burdens heavy, the problems incapable of swift or lasting solution. And under the strains and frustrations imposed by constant tension and harassment, the discordant voices of extremism are heard once again in the land. Men who are unwilling to face up to the danger from without are convinced that the real danger comes from within. They look suspiciously at their neighbors and their leaders. They call for a 'man on horseback' because they do not trust the people. They find treason in our finest churches, in our highest court, and even in the treatment of our water. They equate the Democratic Party with the welfare state, the welfare state with socialism, and socialism with communism. They object quite rightly to politics' intruding on the military -- but they are anxious for the military to engage in politics.

Surprising or Otherwise Interesting Primary Sources, IX: Jedgar on Sunday School

Randall Stephens

Everybody ought to go to Sunday School,
Sunday School, Sunday School.
The mothers and the fathers,
and the boys and the girls,
everybody ought to go to Sunday School.*

Below is an excerpt from J. Edgar Hoover's article on the merits of Sunday School. (Subversives, he wrote, wanted to abolish it.) The piece, in the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction category, appeared in Christian Life Magazine (May 1970). As I was flipping through the pages and stumbled on this, I did a double take. Yes, indeed, this was the J. Edgar Hoover stumping for a cherished institution of Protestant education. I take it that he wrote for other Christian magazines, too. Haven't seen him in CT, but perhaps he graced their pages as well.

J. Edgar Hoover, "The Sunday School Can Lead Us Back," Christian Life (May 1970)

Today the Sunday School is on the defensive. There are those who minimize its positive role. There are others who, whatever their motives, seek to abolish it outright. Should they succeed, they will destroy for much of our youth as well as many older citizens, opportunities to study, discuss and consider, on a regular basis and with others, the real source of this Nation's spiritual strength. . . .

Our Nation has survived the sixties. Save perhaps for that of a century ago when the Union was rent by civil war, no decade in the history of the United States has been more fraught with uncertainty, more torn by violence, or subjected more frequently to high peaks of intense emotion. . . .

The guidance derived from study of the Bible has been immense from our beginnings as a Nation. The French observer, de Tocqueville, tells us that the sovereign authority in the United States in the 1830's was religious. He explains that religion exercised little influence ". . . upon the laws and upon the details of public opinion; but it directs the customs of the community, and by regulating domestic life, it regulates the state." De Tocqueville found that there was no country in the world where the Christian religion retained a greater influence over the souls of men than in this one. And he found the average American to be, in his words, ". . . a highly civilized being, who consents for a time to inhabit the backwoods, and who penetrates into the wilds of the New World with the Bible, an axe, and some newspapers." . . .

It is because believe the future of freedom in our Nation--and. therefore, the fate of the entire world-is dependent upon improving the spiritual life of our country--the quality of life, if you will--that I wholeheartedly support the Sunday School as an institution. I believe it has within it the capacity to become an even more dynamic and evangelistic force than it now is. I believe it must reach out in some manner to encompass and enlighten that great body of pathetic young people who, in the main because they are ignorant of Him, do not believe in God and cannot believe in themselves. I refer particularly to the immature and demanding children of affluence. the "Now!" oriented young people, who--because of parental neglect in the area of discipline--have as their sale guides to action only their own wants and desires.

Martin Luther King on Barry Goldwater: Surprising or Otherwise Interesting Primary Sources, Part IX

Randall Stephens

Martin Luther King, Jr., reflected on the career and influence of Barry Goldwater several years after LBJ's landslide victory. (With all the media attention to King's legacy and uses of the past, a look at King's own views might shed some much needed light.)

King observed the rightward turn of the Republican Party in 1964, the intense anti-government polices of Goldwater, and the Radical Right presence at the GOP convention. "It was both unfortunate and disastrous that the Republican Party nominated Barry Goldwater as its candidate for President of the United States," lamented King. "In foreign policy Mr. Goldwater advocated a narrow nationalism, a crippling isolationism, and a trigger-happy attitude that could plunge the whole world into the dark abyss of annihilation."

But what bothered King more was Goldwater's domestic policies. He offered a stinging critique of what he considered the Arizona Senator's antiquated, out-of-touch ideology:

On social and economic issues, Mr. Goldwater represented an unrealistic conservatism that was totally out of touch with the realities of the twentieth century. The issue of poverty compelled the attention of all citizens of our country. Senator Goldwater had neither the concern nor the comprehension necessary to grapple with this problem of poverty in the fashion that the historical moment dictated. On the urgent issue of civil rights, Senator Goldwater represented a philosophy that was morally indefensible and socially suicidal. While not himself a racist, Mr. Goldwater articulated a philosophy which gave aid and comfort to the racist. His candidacy and philosophy would serve as an umbrella under which extremists of all stripes would stand. In the light of these facts and because of my love for America, I had no alternative but to urge every Negro and white person of goodwill to vote against Mr. Goldwater and to withdraw support from any Republican candidate that did not publicly disassociate himself from Senator Goldwater and his philosophy.*

*From The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, ed., Clayborne Carson (Time Warner, 1998), 247. See also, Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (Harper & Row, 1967).