Frank Lambert - The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America

The Founding Fathers and
the Place of Religion in America

Copyright 2003 by Frank Lambert
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lambert, Frank, 1943
The founding fathers and the place of religion in America / Frank Lambert.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN 978-1-40082-553-0
1. Church and stateUnited StatesHistory18th century. 2. Freedom of religionUnited StatesHistory18th century. 3. United StatesReligionTo 1800. I. Title.
BR516.L29 2003
322'.1'0973dc21 2002024346

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Dante

Printed on acid-free paper.

www.pupress.princeton.edu

Printed in the United States of America

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F O R B E T H

Contents

WHILE I have benefited from the good offices of many people in writing this book, foremost in directly shaping this book is my editor, Thomas LeBien. I am indebted to him for his vision and imagination in the early conception of the project and his knowledge and encouragement in seeing it to completion. The book is better because of his work. I also profited from the critical reading of the manuscript by two scholars, Leigh E. Schmidt and Patrick Griffin, whose insightful comments sharpened my argument. I am once again indebted to Senior Editor Lauren Lepow for her skillful editing, in places making the obscure clear and at others the pedestrian graceful. I, of course, am responsible for remaining flaws and errors.

More removed from the actual writing of the book, but nevertheless a powerful influence, is Tim Breen of Northwestern University. Our friendship extends over fifteen years and has progressed from that of mentor-student to that of colleagues. As an outstanding scholar and teacher, Tim has inspired me through his exemplary record of excellence. And he has on many occasions imparted trenchant conceptual insights, often sketched on a napkin, that have stimulated my own thinking. He aided the writing of this book more directly by inviting me to teach his classes while he was at Oxford University as the Harmsworth Professor. I was able to test ideas on church-state relations before some delightful, tough critics, undergraduates in a capstone course for history majors and graduate students in a reading seminar.

I owe much to the bright undergraduate and graduate students at Purdue and Northwestern Universities who helped shape this work by participating in classes and seminars on the place of religion in America. Through lively discussion and thoughtful papers, they challenged me to reevaluate assumptions and consider alternative frameworks.

I also have the good fortune of having a wonderful, supportive family. My wife, Beth, unfailingly encourages my scholarship, enduring periods of preoccupied silence followed by animated volubility. Our sons, Talley and William, both businessmen with history majors, provide real or feigned interest and, upon occasion, direct research assistance, locating and retrieving archival materials. Punctuating the writing of this book have been two weddings and a birth, bringing to our family two delightful daughters-in-law, Caroline and Paige, and a wonderful grandson, William Reid.

The Founding Fathers and

the Place of Religion in America

IN 1639, a group of New England Puritans drafted a constitution affirming their faith in God and their intention to organize a Christian Nation. Delegates from the towns of Windsor, Hartford, and Wethers field drew up the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, which made clear that their government rested on divine authority and pursued godly purposes. The opening lines express the framers trust in God and their dependence on his guidance: Forasmuch as it hath pleased the All-mighty God by the wise disposition of his divyne providence so to Order and dispose of things,... [and] well knowing where a people are gathered togather the word of God requires that to mayntayne the peace and vnion of such a people there should be an orderly and decent Government established according to God, to order and dispose of the affayres of the people. Moreover, the aim of the government so instituted was religious: to mayntayne and presearue the liberty and purity of the gospell of our Lord Jesus which we now professe, as also the disciplyne of the Churches, which according to the truth of the said gospell is now practised amongst vs.

Those Puritan Fathers exemplify two of the most enduring views of colonial America: America as a haven of religious freedom, and America as a Christian Nation. First, the Puritan settlers had fled England, where Archbishop William Laud had persecuted them because they refused to subscribe to religious beliefs and practices that they deemed to be unscriptural. Now in the American wilderness, they were free to worship according to the dictates of their consciences, governed only by the rule of Gods word. And, second, those Puritan Fathers organized a Christian State. They established their Congregational churches as the official religion of Connecticut, supported by tax revenues and defended by the coercive arm of government. The churches defined heretics, and the state punished them, even to the point of executing those found guilty of direct, express, presumptuous, or high-minded blasphemy. Moreover, citizenship in the state was directly tied to ones religious faith. The authors of the Fundamental Orders meant for only godly Christians to rule, an intention embodied in the oath of the governor, which committed the chief magistrate to govern according to the rule of the word of God.

One hundred and fifty years later, George Washington took another oath, swearing to faithfully execute the office of the President of the United States and pledging to the best of his ability to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. The constitution that he swore to uphold was the work of another group of Americas progenitors, commonly known as the Founding Fathers, who in 1787 drafted a constitution for the new nation. But unlike the work of the Puritan Fathers, the federal constitution made no reference whatever to God or divine providence, citing as its sole authority the people of the United States. Further, its stated purposes were secular, political ends: to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty. Instead of building a Christian Common-wealth, the supreme law of the land established a secular state. The opening clause of its first amendment introduced the radical notion that the state had no voice concerning matters of conscience: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. There would be no Church of the United States. Nor would America represent itself to the world as a Christian Republic.