I just finished a short article by Joseph A. Palermo on Glenn Beck as a historian. Palermo quotes Gordon Wood from a 2006 article in The New York Review of Books:
We can’t solve our current disputes over religion by looking back to the actual historical circumstances of the Founding [sic]; those circumstances are too complex, too confusing, and too biased toward Protestant Christianity to be used in courts today, and most of them are remote from or antagonistic to the particular needs of the twenty-first century. We do not, and cannot, base American constitutional jurisprudence on the historical reality of the Founding [sic]. . . . What Founders’ [sic] intent should we choose to emphasize? That of the deistic Jefferson and Madison? Or that of the churchgoing Washington and Adams, with their sympathies for religion? Or that of the countless numbers of evangelical Protestants who captured control of the culture to an extent most of the Founding [sic] elite never anticipated?
4 comments:
We can if we define our current disputes as a culture war. However, such a war doesn't interest me and I agree with Wood's sentiment that we need to address today's disputes in today's context.
But--and here's another however, the courts continue to appeal to the past and the founding. If decisions about the relationship of church and state (and, more often the case, religion and the public square--a different question, if you ask me) are being made with an appeal to the Founding Fathers, then by all means, we need to have the best understanding of them and their complex historical context as we can.
In other words, we can't be making them all out to be enlightened rationalists or evangelical patriots, but neither can we ignore the respect with which most Americans held for God, or the idea of God, or religion more generally. Nor can we take efforts to disestablish religion at the national level in the new Republic as an attempt to eradicate religious belief, religious thinking, or religious institutions from all public expression and involvement.
Great point, Paul. It is tempting to read Wood as saying the study of the Founding Era does not matter because it cannot solve our culture war battles. This, as your comment makes clear, is not the case.
Gordon Wood's FULL essay, a review of Jon meacham's "American Gospel," presents quite a different picture than Fea/Palermo's excerpt about why the Founding might be unhelpful in our current era. He continues,
Meacham is wrong when he says the story of the Founding has “a particular resonance for our era” and that the Founders’ “time is like our time.” Despite all our current concerns about theocracy, religion then was much more powerful and pervasive than it is today, even though the percentage of church membership may have been smaller then than now; indeed, as Holmes correctly points out, the overwhelming religiosity of the Revolutionary era made the Founders appear “less devout than they were.” Jefferson and Madison and other rationalists were on the defensive against the forces of popular Christian enthusiasm. Franklin was only being wise in advising a friend in 1786 not to publish anything attacking traditional Christianity. “He that spits against the wind,” he said, “spits in his own face.” By contrast today it is the devoutly religious people who feel beset and beleaguered by an increasingly secularizing culture.
Despite Meacham’s claim, the Founders did not really “succeed” in assigning “religion its proper place in civil society.” Meacham can make that claim only because judges in the twentieth century have succeeded in incorporating the First Amendment into the Fourteenth Amendment and then relating it to the states, which was never intended in 1787. Like so many others who write about these matters, Meacham forgets the acute sense of a limited federal government that most late-eighteenth-century Americans had; and he tends to ignore the fact that the First Amendment then applied only to the federal government and not at all to the states.
Tom: Thanks for this comment and the additional quote from Wood.
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