Hutson - Founders on Religion: A Book of Quotations

Copyright 2005 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton,

New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 3 Market Place,

Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1SY

All Rights Reserved

ISBN-13: 978-0-691-12033-1 (cloth)

ISBN-10: 0-691-12033-1 (cloth)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The founders on religion : a book of quotations / [compiled by]

James H. Hutson.

p.cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-691-12033-1 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-691-12033-1 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. ReligionQuotations, maxims, etc. 2. StatesmenUnited States Quotations. I. Hutson, James H.

PN6084.R3F68 2005

200dc22

2005015974

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Palatino with Bauer Bodoni Display

Printed on acid-free paper.

pupress.princeton.edu

Printed in the United States of America

13579108642

Preface

In recent years quote books about religion and the Founding Fathers have appeared with Since they have not been published by the mainstream press, they have escaped the notice of most scholars and a considerable sector of the reading public.

The quote books have been compiled by pious citizens with conservative religious views who are distressed by what they see as the pernicious secularization of American life, caused in their view by an unremitting and illegitimate campaign to banish Christianity from all areas of the public arena as well as from the writing and teaching of American The perceived purging of Christianity from the history of the Founding Period has seemed to the evangelical and conservative religious community to be particularly unconscionable, because its members consider that the remarkable success of this countrys republican experiment in government, launched in 1776 and constitutionalized in 1787, can be attributed in large measure to the religious convictions of the They believe that, if these convictions can be revived and restored as guiding principles in American public life, the nation can be healed of the host of social ills that afflict it.

What better way to prove that the Founders were grounded in and instructed by Christian principles than by calling the most important of them to the witness stand and letting them testify in their own words to the importance of Christianity in their lives? All quote book compilers employ this strategy, invariably focusing on Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Adams, and a handful of lesser luminaries, culling statements from their writings that attest to the beneficent influence of Christianity on their lives and on the public welfare, and presenting these pronouncements in serial On the basis of the evidence offered, they assume that only the most perverse reader could deny that Christianity was the formative force in the founding of the United States

Few compilers of the religious quote books are academic historians, although their volumes frequently contain footnotes and other trappings of In fact, many of compilers are suspicious of the Some renounce professional historians altogether as malign agents of a left-wing conspiracy, dedicated to the obliteration of Christianity from the national Not a few evangelical spokesmen are uncomfortable, in fact, with the undisciplined zeal of some

Convinced that the subject, Religion and the Founding, deserves better treatment than it has received in the religious quote book genre, I offer a quote book that is as objective as possible and that conforms to the canons of historical My expectation is that readers of all religious persuasionsor of nonewill find the book Conservative and evangelical readers who consult the book will, I hope, be persuaded that sound scholarship is not their sworn enemy, as many have been led to believe.

I use a wider variety of sources than is employed in the quote Many of them rely exclusively on secondary sources and are notably incestuous, borrowing freely from one another and perpetuating in the process errors and faulty transcriptions of I have examined numerous collections of original manuscripts and have quarried from them quotations that, in some cases, may be unfamiliar even to Especially fruitful were the papers of Elias Boudinot at the Princeton University Library, of John Dickinson at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and of Roger Sherman at the Yale University Library, as well as the microfilm editions of the papers of John Adams at the Massachusetts Historical Society and of Charles Carroll of Carrollton at the Maryland Historical Society and the recently released online edition of the papers of John Jay at the Columbia University Additionally, the papers of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison at the Library of Congress were searched, with some surprising These new sources offer readers a richer and livelier selection of statements about the religion of the Founders than is now available

A more significant difference between this volume and the conventional quote books is the organizing principle Every quote book of which I am aware is organized by proper name, that is, by an alphabetical list of individuals below whose names a string of quotations is The present volume will be organized alphabetically by subject, beginning with addiction and ending with women. The advantages of using this principle will, I hope, be immediately apparent.

Organization by proper name creates a sense of incoherence, because the self-contained sections make it difficult, even with incessant page turning, to spot common threads running through the volume and to identify subjects on which there is general The quote book compilers who use the proper name design have a narrow agendathe establishment of the religious credentials of the Founders and of their conviction that religion should have a robust role in public lifewhich ignores the depth and breadth of the Founders religious interests. A book organized by subject expands the canvas and, while doing justice to the problem of religion in the public square, permits the presentation of the Founders sentiments, as the present volume does, on more than seventy-five topics, including such perennial faith questions as the nature of God and Jesus Christ, the Trinity, the evidence for an afterlife, the untimely death of loved ones, the authority of and relationship between the Old and New Testaments, the origin of sin, the relation of faith and works and of faith and reason, the credibility of prophecy, the justice of war, the place of Islam and Judaism in the divine economy, and many others.

That the Founders had much to say about these topics should come as no With a few exceptions, Benjamin Franklin being the most conspicuous one, they were regular churchgoers, many active in the affairs of their local George Washington rarely missed an opportunity to attend divine services and took his turn on the vestry of his parish During his two terms as president, Thomas Jefferson, also at one time an Episcopal vestryman, constantly attended public worship in the House of Representatives, once riding through a cloudburst to arrive on Other Founders were at least as active on behalf of their respective churches.