Over at Religion in American History, Jonathan Den Hartog exposes Will's flawed interpretation of religion and the founding fathers and gives Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?: A Historical Introduction a nice plug in the process. Here is a taste of Den Hartog's post:
As a religious historian, though, I specifically wanted to
counter Will's treatment of the attitude of the "Big 5 Founders" he
cites toward religion. Will is at pains to describe each of them as publicly
respectful of religion while not being very religious themselves.
Not only is this territory a minefield, but it's also been an
area of much academic study. With better reading, Will might have gotten a more
nuanced view.
For instance, he could have started with John Fea's Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?
Then, he might have added David Holmes's The Faiths of the Founding Fathers.
For a different take, he could have delved into Gregg Frazer's The Religious Beliefs of America's Founders.
Finally, for analysis from a political scientist, he could
have looked at Vincent Philip Munoz's God and the Founders.
And those are just four titles off the top of my head. What
this scholarship has argued is that there was a lot of religious diversity in
the Revolutionary era. Some of those involved were very orthodox, others much
less so.
This is decidedly not to argue that the most of
the founders were devout Christians. However, even those who weren't orthodox
still held strong religious beliefs. They did, and they practiced them.
So, Will dismisses Franklin as a Deist--he did claim to be
one as a young man--even though his actions during the Revolutionary Era belied
that claim. Or, Will claims Adams's religious beliefs disappeared during his
life, whereas Adams thought and wrote quite a lot about religion. Will misses
that Unitarianism was a robust religious system in the eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries that retained many Protestant forms.
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