Founding Faith (2008) by Steven Waldman examines claims made in today's "culture wars" regarding the religious beliefs and intentions of America's Founding Fathers. Did the Founding Fathers create the United States as a Christian nation with religion a core value in government as today's Christian conservatives claim? Or were the Founding Fathers really Deists and secular humanists who set up a solid wall between church and state as liberal commentators believe? Both sides cherry pick quotes to back up their arguments and in a sense both are correct. And both are wrong.

Waldman conducts an illuminating historical survey of the so-called Founding Fathers and their views on church and state. Waldman focuses on five particular leaders of the Revolutionary and early Federal era: Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. Turns out that the Founding Fathers didn't agree with one another and like many of us their views changed over the course of their lives. All of them were spiritual and to a certain extent Christian (although none of them to the strict standards of today's Christian evangelicals) and believed religion was important to the morality of a society. All believed that religious freedom from government was a boon to religion and worked to protect religious expression.

Sometimes what they prohibited for the Federal government was acceptable for state governments. Politics also played a role in that a strict seperationist like Madison would have to make accomodations in legaslation to appeal a wider political spectrum even when it went against his political ideas. Turns out that what the Founding Fathers said about religion and government was often deliberately vague because they hadn't figured it out themselves. What may matter more to us today is what we believe about church and state and not expecting to find cut & dry answers in the words of the Founding Fathers.

I really enjoyed this book and found it a good analysis of complex and nuanced issues. It's great that Waldman can go beyond myth-busting and side-taking to create a great historical and biographical work of religious issues in our nation.

Recommended reading to go with this book: The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell
Favorite Passages

Careening through Adam's contradictor writings on religion, we are reminded that just because the man was great does not mean he was coherent. He thought Christianity perfect, except for many of its most important teachings. He loved his Puritan ancestors except for their core beliefs. He hated religions' tendency to squelch rational though but admired its effectiveness at instilling morality. The Founding Fathers were brilliant but, like all mortals, changed over time, and Adams in particular had no shyness about expressing his views in certain terms, even as he was still figuring them out. Some of Adam's views, however, only seem contradictory when seen through the prism of our current beliefs. His contempt for hypocritical clergy was not a sign of secularism; his belief in an omnipotent God was not a sign of evangelism. It's just the way militant Unitarians were back then. - p. 38
Was Washington a "good Christian"? By the defintion of Christianity offered by contemporary liberal Christians, he would pass muster. He believed in God, attended church, endorsed the golden rule, and valued the behavioral benefits of religion. More conservative Christians, however, generally believe that being a good Christian means accepting Jesus Christ as personal savior and the Bible as God's revelation. By those standards -- those of twenty-first-century conservative evangelical Christianity -- Washington was not a Christian. - p. 59-60
This idea -- that freedom comes from God -- was the foundation for a new American conception of rights. If rights resulted from a social compact -- a practical way of allowing for mutual survival -- then they certainly could by altered by the majority when it seemed practical or convenient. If they came from God, however, they were immutable and inviolate, whether you were in the majority or not. This had particularly important implications for wrestling with how to define and protect religious liberty. Toleration assumed that the state was generously choosing to do the tolerating. As Thomas Paine put it later, "Toleration is not the opposite of intolerance but the counterfeit of it. Both are despotisms: the one assumes to itself the right of witholding liberty of conscience, the other of granting it." A God-given right is something quite different. - p. 92-93
Thus, many conservatives have it backward. In effect, the conservative accomodationists say that while Congress cannot set up an official state religion, anything else is fair game, since nothing else is prohibited. Madision wanted us to think of it the other way around: Just because Congress is explicitly forbidden from doing one thing (establishing a national religion), that doesn't mean that everything else is acceptable. Madison wanted the opposite assumption -- that any actions no mentioned and specifically sanctioned are prohibited. This concept doesn't apply just to restrictions on religion but to help for religion, too. If Congress wasn't explicitly granted power to aid religion, then it cannot. Congress is not allowed to interfere, restrict, establish, discourage, or encourage religion. In Madison's mind, Congress had one simple assignment when it came to religion: Stay away. - p. 154
Madison's most important isnight was that it would lead to a distrust of religion. It would be assumed, Madison suggested, that the invocation of religion by a politician was, well, political. He and his Baptist allies would be mystified by the assumption that being pro-seperation means being anti-God. How on earth does it follow that if you treasure religion, you'd want government touching it? Church and state, when married, bring out the worst in each other, Madison would say. If God is powerful, he does not need the support of the Treasury.

Indeed, to equate support for religion in the public square with love God is not only an insult to those God-fearing people on the other side of the debate, but also expresses a profound lack of confidence in God and a disconcerting shallowness of personal faith. - p. 201. ( )

I bought this book with high expectations that it would add something to the debate about the religious attitudes of the citizenry at the time of the American Revolution and during the immediate decade thereafter. I was disappointed. The emphasis is on a handful of founders (Adams, Washington, Franklin, Jefferson and Madison), with occasional reference to others (Witherspoon, Mason) and even there the analysis is not always deep, but usually superficial. I think his judgment is generally solid, however. There is extended treatment of Madison's arguments, as there should be, but his treatment of the “established church” in most of the colonies is too brief and in the case of New Jersey, simply incorrect. There is almost no treatment of the role of the Presbyterian or Reformed churches (the only ones with a strong central authority), either in the Revolution or in the debates on the First Amendment.
Throughout the book he uses the device of contrasting the claims of current evangelicals with those of the secularists, showing how the claims of one or the other are overstatements that need to be qualified. That is a productive approach, although Waldman often uses the assertions of the best-known of the evangelicals (Falwell, Focus on the Family, LaHaye), for example, instead of those whose understanding is more subtle. There is scant recognition (two sentences in the chapter on the fear of Anglicans) that at the time of the Revolution more than 75% of the people in the county had no religion, or only the most tenuous connection to any church, or that deism was a powerful strain in the colleges by 1800. Because John Adams asserted that religion and the fear of British religious meddling, as much as taxation, was the cause of the Revolution does not make it so, Adams to the contrary notwithstanding. He asserts that the Great Awakening was the major cause of the growth of dissenting sects when it was immigration, of course, initially, and later the religious fervor that preceded the Second Great Awakening. Compared to the aftermath of the religious revivals such as the Cane Ridge meeting in 1801, the Great Awakening had relatively little impact on the formation of new sects, or even on the founding of new congregations. Certainly that was true in New Jersey which was the locus of one of the major strains of the Great Awakening.
Some redeeming elements should be noted—the account of Patrick Henry's argument against the overturning of the Two Penny Law in Virginia (1763) is too brief for me, but interesting. Madison's work on adoption of Virginia's Statute of Religious Freedom is also brief, but informative. "By the standards of twenty-first century conservative evangelical Christianity", he concludes that "Washington was not Christian." That freshness alone merits attention to this work. Waldman is the founder and editor-in-chief of beliefnet.com. ( )

Both Liberals and Conservatives Have it Wrong

In this highly intellectual and highly engaging text, BeliefNet founder Steven Waldman tackles the debate over what the Founding Fathers intended over the question of religion in the formation of an independent nation-state.

The central thesis of the book is that above all else, the Founding Father sought to promote religious freedom rather than religion itself. Through a careful analysis of their papers at the Library of Congress, Waldman extrapolates the thoughts and intentions of four major characters, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. Each brought their own religious background, ideas, and actions which influenced the debate.

Along the way, Waldman debunks several myths and rethinks several legacies. The American Revolution is traditionally thought as "taxation without representation," but according to Waldman, Adams believed that religion and the fear of Anglican tyranny was a major reason.

One of the more interesting chapters is regarding Jefferson, the most contradictory and paradoxical of all the big four. Specifically, a detailed discussion about the "Jefferson Bible." Waldman characterizes Jefferson as anti-Christian but pro-Jesus, anti-religion but pro-God.

According to Waldman, Madison was the strongest advocate for what we now understand to be the separation of church and state. Understanding Madison is key to understanding what the Founding Fathers intended according to Waldman. "Conservatives are wrong in describing the Constitution as a religious document," but the liberals miss the point too: "The framers of the Constitution were not contemplating the role of 'government' in religion. Tehy were debating the role of the national government in religion." (p. 130-1)

Ultimately, Waldman concludes the book with a rosy optimistic view on religious freedom in the US today. He writes: "Madison would not be surprised that such religious vitality has flourished in the context of increasing tolerance, diversity, and freedom." (p. 205) I think Waldman is right and wrong here. Right because of the religious pluralism that exists between Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, etc.. However, religious tolerance is not necessarily higher, for example, Muslims regularly face increasing discrimination resulting from religious prejudice today.

The book is a highly nuanced look at religion and how the Founding Fathers intended religious freedom to function. I do agree with Waldman in that the recent "culture wars" between conservatives and liberals have distorted and anachronistically interpreted the Constitution to fit their own agendas.

Overall, I highly recommend the book. It is very well-researched, though Waldman's writing sometimes is a little abrasive. The book is a little heavy on consititutionalism and issues of theology, so if you don't have that kind of background, the book might be a little dense. ( )

An excellent book. Waldman's really dives into the wider body of writings of the founding fathers to reconstruct their views on religion, a narrative that helps supplement the conventional biographies of these men by adding a more holistic view of their religious practices and beliefs--something often glossed over by most biographers who seem to under-appreciate the importance religious impulses are in the motivations of men.
Anti-dogmatic, Waldman then takes those vignettes and discusses the founder's thoughts on religion's proper relationship with the state. Waldman asserts that since the Constitution and First Amendment were political documents, neither reflects the exact ideas of any founder and had various interpretations, even at the time of writing. ( )

Waldman does a scrupulous job examining the theology, politics, and other philosophies of some of the most prominent and influential "Founding Fathers" as they relate to the issue of the relationship between church and state. He debunks many of the myths propagated by modern partisans. The analysis is careful and shrewd without being overly scholarly. ( )