In wrestling with religion and politics in the American context, scholars often return to the Founding era. While noting subsequent changes, many share a deep conviction that this era mattered for setting trajectories for the interplay of religion and politics in national life. Such an attitude does not presuppose an originalist orientation — even critics of such approaches often place vast importance on the Founding. Further, this period has witnessed above-average attention in the culture wars, as both sides have reached for historical precedents for their vision of contemporary politics. As a result, much ink has been spilled to understand how the late 18th century laid down patterns that would influence American institutions for centuries to come. The three books under review here wade into such contested territory to offer new perspectives on issues of perennial concern.
Nicholas Miller, Gregg Frazer, and Amanda Porterfield make several significant strategic choices that help them elucidate the period, in the process stretching the parameters for studying the topic. One important step each takes is to stretch the chronology of what counts for understanding the Founding. Nicholas Miller, in The Religious Roots of the First Amendment, pushes all the way back to Martin Luther and the Reformation of the 16th century. From Luther and then the Anabaptists, he traces a genealogy of dissenting Protestants whose connections wind through the era of the English Civil War and Glorious Revolution before becoming instantiated in the American settlement in favor of religious freedom. Gregg Frazer argues that to understand The Religious Beliefs of America's Founders scholars have to start with late-17th-century Britain. Only by wrestling with writers from both sides of the Atlantic who brought Enlightenment rationalism to bear on Christianity can readers grasp the theological framework of the key founders — and hence of the Revolution itself. Finally, Amanda Porterfield, in Conceived in Doubt, stretches the formative period forward to the end of the War of 1812. Porterfield thus enlarges the formative era when the decisions were made, arguing that the Revolution and Constitution opened up the cultural space to determine religion's role in the new nation, rather than finalizing it.
The authors also bring different intellectual frameworks to bear on the Founding, thereby stretching disciplinary approaches to the question. Miller acknowledges that he is writing a history of theological discourse. That is, his approach is an intellectual history with theology being the discipline studied. He is thus interested in thinkers and writers who deployed dissenting religious ideas to advance the idea of liberty of conscience. Although some of his thinkers may be less well known — such as the Dutch Anabaptist historian Pieter Twisck — they are still culture shapers with access to print. Further, he is less interested in how this dissenting tradition played out on the ground in the struggle for practical religious liberty. Frazer similarly traces an intellectual history, since he is interested in ministers and the religious thought of several very articulate founders. More significant for his approach, though, is his reading of the issues through a political theory lens. Frazer attempts to describe a religio-political theory that pervades not only a few thinkers but the entire Revolutionary project. In the categories he uses, his emphasis on a few founders, and his focus on the Declaration and Constitution, Frazer reveals a debt to Straussian political thought. Porterfield approaches her topic with understandings drawn from religious history and religious studies. Her evidence thus ranges broadly to take in the experiences of a wide array of people in the new nation, even making use of fiction to trace evolving perceptions. The work is well-theorized and traces interesting connections between religious culture and the larger culture of which it was a part.
Frazer approaches his topic with contemporary debates very much in mind. He believes that culture warriors on the Right have attempted to baptize the founders as Christians, while those on the Secular Left portray them as free-thinking Deists. Frazer thus addresses a well-worn topic of “What did the founders believe?” but answers it in a new way, arguing that the belief of the major founders — which he views mostly monolithically — and the public theology of the Revolution were shaped by “Theistic Rationalism.” This third way position suggests that both of the other positions are incorrect. Frazer adopts “theistic rationalism” even while acknowledging the ahistorical nature of the term: no one at the time used it. Still, he believes that the term gives conceptual clarity and so should be adopted over alternatives such as “Rational Religion,” “Theism,” or “Rational Christianity” (9–12). Frazer believes that at the heart of this system was an Enlightenment Rationalism that set human reason as the judge of the content of religion, thus elevating human authority over the divine. Still, this rationalism was decidedly Theistic, acknowledging a reasonable, benevolent, unitary god who responded to prayers, intervened in the world, and presided over a future state of rewards and punishments. Frazer is at pains to communicate that while this religious belief fell far short of Christianity — which Frazer defines as the creedal beliefs of Protestants and Catholics — it also was much more than Deism. If European Deists held to a clock-maker god with no intervention in the world, then all founders, even the most rationalist, believed in more than that.
After defining his terms, Frazer's argument proceeds in three parts: how theistic rationalism grew and was disseminated, how theistic rationalism manifested itself in the major founders, and how theistic rationalism might shape the understanding of the Revolution and the American regime. For the first part, Frazer sees theistic rationalism growing out of the English Enlightenment, where it was articulated by the (third) Earl of Shaftesbury, Joseph Priestley, Samuel Clarke, and Conyers Middleton. Over all of them, however, hovers the figure of John Locke. In Frazer's reading — one largely following Michael Zuckert — Locke replaced any divine or revelatory grounding for politics through his appeal to reason, the State of Nature, and human contract. In the American setting, these ideas were passed along by rationalist ministers such as Jonathan Mayhew and Charles Chauncy. During the Revolution, ministers who spoke about politics used principles derived from Locke and the rationalists, rather than from Scripture (which, for Frazer, demanded faithfulness to Romans 13 and a political theory of non-resistance).
In the second section, Frazer turns to “major” founders, those most involved in the Declaration of Independence, the drafting and ratification of the Constitution, and the new government. He combs through their papers in an attempt to reconstruct what these founders believed theologically. He begins by demonstrating that John Adams, although early on a Congregationalist, was decidedly not orthodox. He then argues the other side by showing that Jefferson and Franklin, though often claimed as Deists, believed in too much to be Deists by European standards. Similarly, Washington never claimed to be a Christian and never partook of Anglican Communion, but he encouraged public religiosity and believed in divine aid. Frazer explains that these opinions can all best be described as “theistic rationalism.” In a subsequent chapter, he examines the less-profuse works of Gouverneur Morris, James Wilson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton. He finds that these “key framers” of the Constitution also shared a “theistic rationalist” view. In lumping them together, however, Frazer risks homogenizing different thinkers: Adams's religious views evolved, Hamilton was decidedly more pious at the beginning and ending of his life than during his public career, and Wilson had much respect for divine activity. Morris may have spoken like a theistic rationalist, but his immoral behavior seemed to suggest he had little fear of any judgment.
In his final section, Frazer considers how using “theistic rationalism” as an interpretive concept could shape scholars' understanding of the Revolution. He first argues that the Declaration should be read as a theistic rationalist document, with its references to God falling below standards for orthodox Christianity. Further, the silence of the “godless Constitution” on religious matters, followed by the First Amendment's grant of total religious liberty, arose from indifference to religion, rather than religious diversity or principled separation. Finally, Frazer sees in theistic rationalism the core of American civil religion. By identifying it, Frazer can prophetically warn Americans that its content is decidedly sub-Christian. Theistic Rationalism thus works not only as an accurate descriptor but as a test against which to measure current public attitudes.
If Frazer's key term is “theistic rationalism,” Miller's two terms are “dissenting Protestants” and the “right to private judgment.” With these concepts, Miller argues that the view of church and state that came to shape the First Amendment was predicated on theological categories. In contrast to Magisterial Protestants who aimed to continue state church relationships in both Europe and Puritan New England, dissenting Protestants traced their roots to Anabaptists in Europe and Baptists in the American colonies. This stream of thought emphasized the “right to private judgment” as the logical out-growth of the priesthood of all believers. Because conscience should not be violated, governments had no legitimate role in mandating or supporting any religious expression. Although this concept came to be expressed in Enlightenment terms — here, too, Locke comes into play — the bedrock understanding came from religious categories.
Miller takes a wide-ranging survey of this concept. Starting with the Reformation, he sees Anabaptists adopting an argument for religious liberty. These beliefs were mediated most significantly in Holland as Anabaptists shaped the thinking of the early English Baptists. In England, Baptist appeals influenced public opinion and shaped John Milton's pleas for religious toleration.
One of Miller's strongest chapters entails tracing connections between William Penn, Quakers, and John Locke's arguments for toleration. Miller argues that Penn and Locke knew each other at Oxford, and that while Locke was in exile in Holland, it was Penn who interceded for his return to England. Penn's arguments for religious liberty reflected those of religious dissenters, which he had learned at the Protestant Academy at Saumur, France. Penn's writings were present in the library of the Quaker who hosted Locke in Holland. Locke then translated both Penn's views and those of other dissenters like Henry Stubbe into the theoretical language of his “Letter Concerning Toleration.” In Miller's telling Locke represented merely a shift in language for a principle built on theological categories. Here Miller adds something new to our understanding about the religious background to Locke's thought.
Shifting to America, Miller contends that Quaker-dominated Pennsylvania, with a vision of religious liberty defined by Penn himself, represented the future for American public life. To gain this principle, though, contests in other states had to be won, so Miller turns to several additional case studies. In New England, Miller sees Elisha Williams's arguments in favor of religious itinerants during the Great Awakening as an important adoption of dissenting principles by a representative of the established Congregationalism. Baptists such as Isaac Backus carried the struggle in New England further. In New York, William Livingston used his Independent Reflector newspaper to object to Anglican control of King's College. Here, too, Livingston demonstrated “that the consilience in colonial America between dissenting Protestant thought and Enlightenment thought on religious disestablishment was not mere chance … This cooperative relationship made for a powerful combination of popular and elite thought” (131).
Miller's final chapter uses the thought and actions of James Madison and John Witherspoon (with whom Madison had studied at Princeton) to trace how full religious liberty became both a religious and a political principle. Miller sees this dual development at work in the summer of 1787. While Madison worked on framing a national Constitution, Witherspoon drafted a constitution for the Presbyterian denomination. This Presbyterian Constitution differed significantly from similar documents from Britain because of its explicit denial of any claim to or desire for state recognition or support. Miller reads Madison's work for the First Amendment through his previous work for disestablishment in Virginia. This oft-told tale is modified by its pairing with Witherspoon for a combination of religious belief and political form that Miller believes defined American religious liberty. He thus concludes that the dissenting Protestant view of religious liberty had triumphed in America and laid the theological groundwork for the First Amendment.
Meanwhile, Porterfield's account of religion and politics in the early republic centers on the problem of doubt. In Porterfield's telling, the idealistic Revolution faltered after the Constitution's enactment, as doubt on multiple levels troubled the republic. On the religious scene, questions about Christian revelation received much play, and Porterfield does well to pay attention to the disputes surrounding Tom Paine's Age of Reason. Politically, many Americans mistrusted the new federal government, as demonstrated by protests and rebellions. Further, the emerging system of Federalists and Democrats created much partisan mistrust. As the population grew more transient, individual identities became fluid and broke down; well-meaning citizens could not even trust their neighbors. This breakdown of trust threatened the republican experiment.
Into this situation, according to Porterfield, came “Religion to the Rescue.” She interprets the expansion of Christianity in the 1790s–1810s — the early stages of the Second Great Awakening — as benefiting from the mistrust in other institutions of society. In fact, Porterfield goes so far as to suggest that “The churches manipulated distrust as well as relieved it, feeding the uncertainty and instability they worked to resolve” (2). Thus, doubt could be channeled into on-going support of the surging Protestant denominations and to a very real exclusion of those actually raising doubts, such as Paine and other free-thinkers. Churches also responded by creating denominational structures that were non-democratic. To Porterfield, this was a further reaction against the democratic potential of the Revolution, as it brought in a monarchical form — predicated on the sovereignty of God and authority of ministers — to control church members.
Given these religious and cultural factors, Porterfield attempts to sketch how religious groups impacted the political alignments of the times. Here, too, she finds an attack on religious skepticism. Baptists and increasingly Methodists came to support Democrats, but through a religion-based politics. Meanwhile, Federalists used an attack on irreligion to preserve their positions of governmental leadership. In the process, religious skepticism was caught in this pincer of religious groups from both political parties and forced out of public respectability.
These religion-based politics apparently failed to solve the republic's problems, however. Jumping ahead to the War of 1812, Porterfield suggests that alongside religious culture a distinct Honor Culture developed, and despite tensions these two could coexist in the new nation. Based in the South (home to growing Baptist and Methodist denominations), Honor Culture offered a route to building nationalism that could be embraced by the entire populace. A politics of honor helped propel the nation into war with Britain. The end result was a nation tied together by concerns over honor and manhood, coupled to a patriotic religion that was constantly on guard against religious skepticism. Porterfield sees these processes from the early republic as shaping the on-going structures of religious and political culture of the nation.
Porterfield intentionally writes to modify the historiography of the Second Great Awakening, aiming particularly to supplant Nathan Hatch's classic work The Democratization of American Christianity. Porterfield attacks Hatch's presentation directly: “Hatch did as much to mask the developing relationship between religion and politics as to reveal it … Hatch's interpretation … fails to pierce the evangelical cloaking, and exploitation, of doubt” (11). Whereas Hatch had celebrated the liberating and anti-authoritarian elements of the Awakening, Porterfield counters by looking at its coercive means and mechanisms. Evangelical religion, coupled to a celebration of white male liberty — which Porterfield insists on labeling inexactly as “libertarian” — made for a potent, even dangerous, mixture. Porterfield deserves to be read alongside Hatch — as they undoubtedly will be in many graduate seminars. Placing the two volumes side by side suggests that for both individuals and politics, the Second Great Awakening could function ironically as both liberating and coercive.
Together, these works in conversation limn some interesting contrasts. They all take differing positions on the role of the Enlightenment in this era. Frazer and Miller disagree on the same field of ideas. Frazer sees enlightened reason as altering the fundamentals of Christian faith and political philosophy, thereby seducing Americans into Revolution and a modern, rights-based liberalism. By contrast, Miller argues that in the British setting dissenting Protestant thought, when translated in Enlightenment categories, still remained true to its Christian backgrounds. This contrast becomes sharper as the two reflect on the role of Locke in the American Revolution. Frazer sees Locke as replacing older political constructs with a new emphasis on “natural rights.” Miller, for his part, sees a great deal of continuity. His Locke is much friendlier to the Christian tradition — and more easily and safely assimilated. Without simply splitting the difference, it seems to this reader that Locke was less benign than Miller suggests but not the éminence grise suggested by Frazer. Further, both would need to do more work to demonstrate how exactly Locke was assimilated and deployed.
By contrast, Porterfield reads the Enlightenment's influence on the early republic largely through the lens of Paine. Focusing on the stream identified by Henry May (in The Enlightenment in America) as the “Skeptical Enlightenment,” Porterfield believes that the most important advances came from the most freethinking. Deploying “critical inquiry,” Paine and others demonstrated a “willingness to doubt and dismantle institutions of political and religious authority” (12, 18). For the most part, Porterfield's Enlightenment is hostile to revealed religion and in conflict with it. When she turns her attention to evangelical attempts to use Scottish Common Sense Philosophy as an adaptation of Enlightenment, she perceives the end result negatively (124–125). Thus, Enlightenment was an existential challenge, not a potential ally.
Additionally, the authors believe that their studies have value in the present. Frazer is clear that he is trying to correct misperceptions of the founders' religion held by all sides of the culture wars. Thus, an understanding of the founders' religion sheds light not only on the past but on the nature of the American regime and on what principles might better structure civic engagement. Miller is even more explicit in his extended Epilogue. He argues that religious liberty is not only the “first freedom” listed in the Constitution, but it is the first in priority. Its misunderstanding, for Miller, leads to the abuse and loss of other rights. A work of reclamation in understanding the principles of religious liberty is necessary for the right ordering of political liberty in the present (170–171). Miller's historical genealogy reflects his opinion not only of what the case was in the 18th century but what should be the case in the present. Although Porterfield does not directly address contemporary concerns, she subtly suggests an anti-originalist stance. That is, the dynamics of the period she describes set up negative trends which continue to hobble relations of religion and politics in the present. “A response to the mistrust and suspicion that escalated during economic crises, as well as a means of repressing skeptical criticism in both religion and politics, the jerry-built fusion of organizational efficiency, sentimentality, and hostility to open-ended inquiry became an American way of life” (206). Porterfield suggests that to restore “open-ended inquiry” into public discourse thus requires an interrogation, critique, and undoing of a fusion developed in the early republic. Recognizing such biases should not distract from the historical scholarship in each of these works but might temper how they are read.
Although each of these works raises important points for understanding the period, each of them also misses opportunities. For Frazer and Miller, this is particularly true in their failures to interact with relevant scholarship. Frazer's concern for addressing other political theorists means that he misses much relevant historical scholarship about religion and the founders. For example, although he cites an earlier work by Mark Noll, he does not engage with Noll's more nuanced work America's God, an important study of how theology interacted with political concepts, especially the idea of republicanism. Even more significantly, Frazer misses the opportunity to interact with David Holmes's The Faiths of the Founding Fathers. Holmes would be an important target, because he surveyed many of the same figures Frazer does and concluded that the label “Deist” was appropriate for them. Further, Holmes correctly identified several definite orthodox founders, including Samuel Adams, Elias Boudinot, and John Jay. Frazer fails to deal with these figures, because they do not fit his frame about “major” founders. Nor does Frazer engage with the idea that there might have been multiple religious voices in the period. Theistic Rationalism runs the risk of homogenizing all religious belief in the Revolution. Rather than promoting a more complex view of the period, it threatens to flatten our understanding of the diversity of religious voices in the era.
Similarly, while Miller covers a great deal of territory, there are also significant gaps, perhaps the result of a quick transition from a dissertation. While the book has an admirable transatlantic story, conspicuously absent is J.C.D. Clark's significant work The Language of Liberty. Clark was also interested in dissenting Protestants and argued that dissenting politics shaped governmental restructuring in both Britain and America. Miller's story could have dovetailed with Clark's wide-ranging opus, but there is no mention of it. Similarly, Miller missed an opportunity to engage with the recent scholarship of Christopher Grenda, who has covered a great deal of the territory that Miller addresses (see his “Faith, Reason, and Enlightenment: The Cultural Sources of Toleration in Early America” in The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America). Along the way, Miller writes strongly against those he dubs “Neo-Puritans” (such as John Witte and James Hutson) who emphasize the Puritan, Reformed, and even Christian Republican origins of American religious liberty. While Miller is right to advance the claims of the dissenting Protestants he studies, this should not lead to ignoring other significant voices, from other confessional or regional traditions, that shaped the period. Finally, the book is strewn with errata, which mars the presentation. Among those misidentified or misspelled are historical figures Jonathan Edwards, Jonathan Mayhew, and Charles Chauncy and historians Jon Butler, Daniel Dreisbach, and Perez Zagorin.
By contrast, Porterfield is well-grounded in the secondary literature. If anything, at points she may be too dependent on secondary sources. The question that recurred to me in reading Conceived in Doubt was about action and agency. Porterfield traces significant structural changes, but how these changes came about seems vague. Broad references to “ministers” or “churches” occur, but exactly who and how is not presented. This vagueness also raises questions about intentionality. When Porterfield claims that churches “managed” or “manipulated” doubt, such claims suggest an intentional plan, worked out by specific leaders. If so, who figured this out and how was it implemented? Despite many colorful descriptions in the study, this reader was left wondering who actually brought about the changes she describes.
The three books under review here stretch our perspectives and challenge us to think more broadly about religion and public life during this period. First, they are right to stretch our chronologies. Instead of a narrow focus on 1763 (or 1775) to 1787, we need a much broader perspective. Here, Porterfield is particularly helpful in pushing our perspective to consider religious struggles in the very early republic. This is a field that is ripe for development. As my own study of religion in the Federalist Party has suggested, religion touched on many elements of the period and helped to structure political debates, party formation, and cultural developments.
Next, these authors demonstrate the value of methodological pluralism in answering such contested questions. Scholars of political science; religious, political, and intellectual history; and religious studies all need to be at the interpretive table. With this diverse audience, scholars need to pay attention to the questions, insights, and literature of each other's fields. No longer should it be possible or desirable to address answers to the question only to a subfield. We need broader reading and engagement.
Finally, these studies suggest the need to see how lived religion and lived politics interacted “on the ground.” A study of more individuals is necessary. No longer can scholars pay attention only to a handful of “Founding Fathers,” although those founders should not be forgotten. Rather, a greater net should be cast to understand how these problems worked out in practice. A good example of this comes in John Fea's recent study of the patriot chaplain Philip Vickers Fithian (The Way of Improvement Leads Home: Philip Vickers Fithian and the Rural Enlightenment in Early America). With such appreciation, it will become apparent that multiple languages, ideologies, and belief structures were simultaneously present in the Founding Era, a point made two decades ago by Isaac Kramnick (“The ‘Great National Discussion’: The Discourse of Politics in 1787,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 45: 1 [January 1988]: 3–32). Rather than ideologies being mutually exclusive, individuals could mix and match categories. If that is the case, then the interesting question becomes not whether a particular individual or group adopted a certain category of thinking, but how they combined disparate ideas into a system that made sense to them. The resulting answers will lend more texture to what scholars already understand was a fascinating and formative period. In contributing to understanding a long Revolutionary Era, these works have stretched the field for further scholarship.
