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A Critic at Large
http://LibertyUnderGod.com and
http://IsAmericaAChristianNation.com
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In the left-hand column is an article from The New Yorker magazine. In the right-hand column is a response written from the perspective of Christian "Anarcho-Theocracy," which is a radically consistent version of "Liberty Under God." This view holds that all individuals and institutions have a duty to acknowledge God and obey His Commandments, especially the commandment to eschew violence and compulsion, and to leave vengeance to God. The State being the institutionalization of vengeance and
violence, a truly Christian nation is therefore a State-less nation. More on this view can be found here: http://LibertyUnderGod.com and http://IsAmericaAChristianNation.com |
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Each of the Founders had his own approach to religion. |
This single sentence contains hundreds of errors. Its ambiguity is calculated to play on the ignorance of modern historically illiterate Americans. George Mason's draft of Article XVI of the Virginia Declaration of Rights of 1776 says religion is "the duty which we owe to our Creator." Every human being has this duty. Even the government has this duty. Even self-proclaimed atheists have this duty (and they know it). And every human being has the duty to get it right, because God Himself defines the duty of the creature toward the Creator. But Mason went on to add that "the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence.” All of this has to do with how human beings worship the Creator. Yes, every human being has his or her own approach to religion. But America's Founders did not believe that all religions were equally valid. They believed there really was something called "Truth" (something our "postmodern" era denies). The Founders believed Christianity was the "true religion" and others were "false religions," but one Founder could be a Baptist and another a Presbyterian. America's Founders stood for the proposition that the State should not be used to force Baptists to be Presbyterians. The Founders also believed that God had ordained government to punish evil and reward good. This means the duty of the government is to "legislate morality." Every single person who signed the Constitution believed that the Ten Commandments (as a start) were to be enforced by the government. It was not until 1980 that the Supreme Court "discovered" that the Constitution was intended to give the federal government power to remove copies of the Ten Commandments from classrooms. Murder, theft, perjury, homosexuality, human sacrifice, polygamy, were all punished by the governments created by America's Founding Fathers because such acts were contrary to "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God," even if these acts were religiously required by the false gods of false religions, sincerely believed by devout adherents to be divine obligations of religious duty. There were limits to "freedom of religion." Those limits were prescribed by Christianity. In short, the Founders did not like the clergy using State power to promote their own denomination and penalizing their competitors, but neither did the Founders believe in a "secular" (atheistic, Godless) government. |
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| “A wise man adheres not to his religion, because it was that of his ancestors,” a smooth-tongued mullah says to a tongue-tied American in Royall Tyler’s 1797 novel “The Algerine Captive.” The American, a luckless New Englander named Updike Underhill, had been sold into slavery among Muslims after Barbary pirates captured the ship on which he served as a surgeon. At the hands of his captors, he had been whipped, beaten, and bastinadoed—the soles of his feet caned to pulp—and he had borne it all. The terms of his terrible bondage: he will be freed only if he converts to Islam. Stoic, and secure in his Calvinism, Underhill agrees to a debate. |
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| Tyler, a Vermont lawyer, found inspiration for “The Algerine Captive” in an American foreign-policy quagmire. In 1783, when the Peace of Paris ended the Revolutionary War, American seamen lost the protection of Britain’s treaties with the so-called Barbary States: Algiers, Tripoli, Morocco, and Tunisia. Over the next decade, more than seven hundred American sailors were captured and held as slaves in North Africa. When Congress was slow to respond, the public rallied, raising money to pay for the captives’ ransom, and giving con men the idea for a new ruse known, in the trade, as the Algerian Prisoner Fraud. In 1794, the American novelist, playwright, and actress Susanna Rowson starred in a benefit performance in Philadelphia of her play “Slaves in Algiers.” American emissaries finally secured the release of the prisoners in 1796. “The Algerine Captive,” published the following year, wasn’t a fund-raiser; it was a polemic about religious freedom. Royall Tyler had something to say about the liberty of conscience: Faith answers to reason. | If McDonald's wants to sell BigMacs in China, and the Chinese Communists put Ronald McDonald in the laogai (the Chinese gulag), is it the obligation of the U.S. Congress to rescue the McDonald's employee, or is it McDonald's duty to provide its own security for corporate employees?
Faith answers to truth, not coercion. Reason answers to faith. Reason presupposes in faith that the mind of man was created by a reasonable Creator. If "reason" leads one to the conclusion that the Jews must be gassed, "reason" should be checked by faith. If "reason" concludes that there is no God, that the universe is ultimately irrational, and that reason itself is an illusion created by electrical impulses passing through the synapses of our brain, a product of repeated genetic mutations, "reason" should be checked by faith. Reason, like every aspect of man, must be faithful to God. |
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| Underhill’s debate with the mullah lasts five days. “Our religion was disseminated in peace; yours was promulgated by the sword,” Underhill insists. This the mullah contradicts: “The history of the Christian church is a detail of bloody massacre.” But Christianity must be the one true religion, Underhill counters, else how had so much of the world been so persuaded by the teachings of a few fishermen, so quickly? “If you argue from the astonishing spread of your faith,” the mullah answers, remember that “Mahomet was an illiterate camel driver,” born nearly six centuries after Christ, and yet his faith had spread through Arabia, Asia, and Africa and a great part of Europe: “In a word, view the world.” | Who in our secular, de-Christianized era could sustain their attention for a five-day debate on religion? Secularization has led to illiteracy and "attention deficit disorder." The Average American in colonial America could listen to a 2-hour sermon and regurgitate the main points later that week. The Pulpit was more influential in that day that Oprah is today.
It is, perhaps, an unfortunate fact that "Christians" have joined hands with "the State" to promote the true religion by the sword (government laws and punishments). I say "perhaps" because in many cases great evils have been prevented or terminated. But overall, the history of the Christian church is the rise of hospitals, orphanages, universities, liberty, the work ethic and rising standards of living. As Christians become more mature and more like Christ, they become the benefactors of mankind. As Muslims and atheists become more consistent with their presuppositions, they become more lethal. |
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| Above all, the mullah, himself a convert, asserts that Underhill, who had inherited his faith, had never examined it. “Born in New England, my friend, you are a christian purified by Calvin,” he observes. “Born in the Campania of Rome, you had been a papist. Nursed by the Hindoos, you would have entered the pagoda with reverence, and worshipped the soul of your ancestor in a duck. Educated on the bank of the Wolga, the Delai Lama had been your god. In China, you would have worshipped Tien, and perfumed Confucius, as you bowed in adoration . . . of your ancestors.” | America was a Calvinist nation. Who would want to trade that for any other religion?
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| You won’t read about this debate in a crop of new books on religious liberty and the founding of America, an omission that can’t be charged to Royall Tyler’s obscurity. He wasn’t always obscure. He was a prolific and talented satirist, and “The Algerine Captive” was popular enough that it was reprinted in England, becoming only the second American novel to achieve that distinction. It’s overlooked for lots of reasons, not least among them that Royall Tyler, however distinguished, wasn’t a Founding Father, but also because novels don’t make law. | Lepore underestimates the effect of philosophers and literature on law. The novels of existentialist philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus influenced the public policy of France. Francis Schaeffer traced the influence of theology > philosophy > literature > popular culture > law in How Should We Then Live? But there is no evidence that Royall Tyler had much influence on the development of American law and
constitutional theory. He's been resurrected by our New Yorker critic to help spread the myth of "separation of church and state" in the minds of Americans who are victims of educational malpractice. |
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| On the subject of religious liberty in America, there are four indispensable, foundational texts: | ||
| Jefferson’s 1786 statute (“Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry”); | See the U.S. Supreme Court's use of Jefferson in denying "religious freedom" to polygamous Mormons in the late 19th century. | |
| Madison’s 1785 “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments” (“The Religion of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man”); | In his "Remonstrance," Madison said laws should promote Christianity. He quotes Mason's Declaration of Rights for Virginia, defining religion as the duty we owe to our Creater. With the offering of the "Statute for Religious Freedom," Madison simultaneously offered other bills written by Jefferson. These bills include "A Bill for Punishing Disturbers of Religious Worship and Sabbath Breakers," "A Bill for Appointing Days of Public Fasting and Thanksgiving," and "A Bill Annulling Marriages Prohibited by the Levitical Law, and Appointing the Mode of Solemnizing Lawful Marriage." None of these bills were inconsistent with the Statute or the Remonstrance, and all of them are Theocratic and would be called
"unconstitutional" by the Court today. D. Dreisbach, "A New Perspective on Jefferson's Views on Church-State Relations: The Virginia Statute for Establishing Religious Freedom in its Legislative Context," 35 Amer. J. of Leg. Hist. 205 (1991). |
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| Article VI of the Constitution (“No religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States”); and | A "religious test" meant membership in particular church, or as Madison often said, "ecclesiastical body." See the Framers' actions in drafting state constitutions. | |
| the First Amendment (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”). | The First Amendment is really not that useful in understanding "religious liberty" in America. That Amendment had more to do with relations between the states and the newly-created federal government. It did not require the states to give up their Theocratic commitments. | |
| These are at once statements of political philosophy and legal documents; philosophers argue about them within a specific intellectual tradition, and legal scholars read them to trace precedent. Martha Nussbaum takes both of these approaches in “Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America’s Tradition of Religious Equality” (Basic; $28.95). But because these documents long ago rose to the status of American scripture, another way
to read them is to conduct an exegesis, which is more or less what Garry Wills does in “Head and Heart: American Christianities” (Penguin; $29.95). Politicians tend to use them genealogically, naming their authors as forebears or, as the case may be, glaringly omitting them. (“My faith is the faith of my fathers,” Mitt Romney declared in a speech last December, skipping over Jefferson and Madison in favor of Brigham Young, John and Samuel Adams, and the seventeenth-century
Puritan dissenter Roger Williams.) The legal, the exegetical, the genealogical—each centers on the Founding Fathers: What did they intend? What did they mean? What would they make of us? |
Any honest and objective answer to these three questions should be fairly simple and straightforward. Did the Founders intend to give the federal government the power to remove the Ten Commandments from classrooms, and to prohibit prayer before high school football games? These are just two manifestations of the myth of "separation of church and state" | |
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“History is after all only a pack of tricks we play on the dead,” Voltaire once quipped. The Founding Fathers had their own pack of tricks: they turned their backs on the past. If they had meekly inherited the faith of their fathers, they would have written a constitution establishing Christianity as the national religion. They did not. Nearly every American colony was settled with an established religion; Connecticut’s 1639 founding document explained that the whole purpose of government was “to mayntayne and presearve the liberty and purity of the gospell of our Lord Jesus.” In the century and a half between that charter and the 1787 meeting of the Constitutional Convention lies an entire revolution, not just a political revolution but also a religious revolution, as Frank Lambert, a
historian at Purdue, argued in his 2003 study, “The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America |
Not just "nearly" -- every American colony was settled with an established religion. Also an established church. In the 1600's nearly every government in the Western World had an established church. After the War for Independence, no colony had an established church (the Church of England had been disestablished by the Revolution) but every colony was still a Christian Theocracy. Some would return to an established church; most did not. The idea of a Baptist being forced by the State to pay taxes for an Episcopalian clergy had become an un-Christian concept, in large part because of the imposition of British bishops on the colonies by the Church of England, as Carl
Bridenbaugh has described. The last three sentences of the paragraph at left sound like the federal constitution imposed secularism on the Theocratic Christian colonies. That's ridiculous. The Theocratic Christian colonies prohibited the federal government from imposing any brand of Christianity on the Theocratic states. The idea that the federal government would attempt to impose atheism on the states -- say, by removing copies of the Ten Commandments from public places or classrooms, or banning voluntary prayer and Bible reading in schools -- was not even on the horizon.
I would like to know the names of the "two states" that did not impose a "religious test" for office. This will help determine the meaning of "religious test" in the mind of the author. |
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| The Constitution and the Bill of Rights were controversial when they were written and they’ve been controversial ever since, but Article VI and what is known as the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment have been controversial in the last half century because of the Supreme Court’s 1947 decision in Everson v. Board of Education, which reaffirmed the Fourteenth Amendment’s extension (or “incorporation”) of the Establishment Clause to the states and, citing both Jefferson’s Virginia Statute and Madison’s Remonstrance, interpreted the Establishment Clause to mean that the Framers intended there to be a “wall of separation” between church and state: “Neither a state nor the Federal Government can set up a church. Neither can pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions or prefer one religion to another.” |
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| The debate that ensued has not been confined to the courts, as Lambert illustrates in his new book, “Religion in American Politics: A Short History” (Princeton; $24.95). Any serious challenge to Everson requires an alternative explanation of those four foundational texts, an explanation usually supported by other writings of Jefferson and Madison, the records of the Constitutional Convention and the papers of its delegates, and the
records of the state ratifying conventions and of the first Congress. Opponents of Everson have argued that the Founders were Christians. “Any diligent student of American history finds that our great nation was founded by godly men upon godly principles to be a Christian nation,” Jerry Falwell insisted in 1980. The Founders never meant to drive religion from “the public square,” some insist. Mitt Romney used his reading of history to accuse modern-day secularists, “at odds with the nation’s founders,” of having taken the doctrine of separation of church and state “well beyond its original meaning” by seeking “to remove from the public domain any acknowledgement of God.” Against this argument stand scholars like Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore, whose 1996 “The
Godless Constitution: A Moral Defense of the Secular State” was republished in 2005, with an added chapter on George W. Bush’s first Presidential term. |
Revisionist books are a dime a dozen these days. On my website, "Is America a Christian Nation?" I invite the reader to wear the shoes of a sociologist from Mars, visiting earth to learn about American history. Any unbiased observer will see:
Most of the evidence accumulated by modern secularist revisionist authors consists of criticisms by the Founders of clergy who wanted to substitute state coercion for reason and persuasion. Not a single Founder envisioned a secular or "Godless state." |
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| Whether the mail should be sorted on Sundays, whether “In God We Trust” belongs on our coins, whether the Pledge of Allegiance should include “under God,” whether our children should pray at school, whether we can have crèches on town commons at Christmas, everyone wants to know: What would the Founders do? | The first question is, Would the Founders have the federal government impose one answer or the other on the states? The answer is, NO. The second question is, Would the Founders want the federal government to be "Godless?" The answer is, NO. |
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| It’s a question Thomas Jefferson found ridiculous. In 1816, when he was seventy-three and many of his revolutionary generation had already died, he offered this answer: “This they would say themselves, were they to rise from the dead. . . . Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind.” The Founders believed that to defer without examination to what your forefathers believed was to become a slave to the tyranny of the past. Jefferson put it this way: “Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the arc of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human.” | That letter of 1816 has nothing to do with religion. It has to to with Amending the Constitution, or as Jefferson proposed, abolishing it and starting over every 20 years or so. This is a very different subject from interpreting the Constitution.
Jefferson admonished Supreme Court Justice William Johnson: On every question of construction, carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed.Madison wrote: I entirely concur in the propriety of resorting to the sense in which the Constitution was accepted and ratified by the nation. In that sense alone it is the legitimate Constitution. And if that be not the guide in expounding it, there can be no security for a consistent and stable, more than for a faithful, exercise of its powers. . . . What a metamorphosis would be produced in the code of law if all its ancient phraseology were to be taken in its modern sense. |
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| Treating the Founders like saints has made for some pretty wacky books, none more so than the 1987 “Faith of Our Founding Fathers” by Tim LaHaye, an Evangelical minister who went on to co-write a series of bestselling apocalyptic novels. LaHaye attempted to chronicle the “Rape of History” by “history revisionists” who had erased from American school text-books the “evangelical Protestants who founded this nation.” Documenting this
claim is no mean feat, not least because even those members of the Constitutional Convention who called themselves Christian lived in a decidedly irreligious and anti-clerical age, the most secular age in American history, both before and since, as Garry Wills observes in “Head and Heart” (a book that is both a close reading of founding texts and a sprawling history of Christianity in the United States). |
To say that America in 1776 -- and especially her political and cultural institutions --was more secular than today, is pathological historiography. Recall, for example, the events surrounding the completion of the Constitution.
Survey the evidence here: Is America a Christian Nation? |
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| Most of the Founding Fathers were deists, although not all of them were as skeptical as Jefferson, who crafted a custom copy of the Bible by cutting out everything but the words of Jesus. LaHaye, to support his argument, took out his own pair of scissors, deciding, for instance, that Jefferson doesn’t count as a Founding Father, because he “had nothing to do with the founding of our nation,” and basing his claims about Franklin not on evidence (because, as he writes, “there is no evidence that Franklin ever became a Christian”) but on the bald, raising-the-Founders-from-the-dead assertion “Many modern secularizers try to claim Franklin as one of their own. I am confident, however, that Franklin would not identify with them were he alive today.” | Not a single Signer of the Constitution was a deist. Every single one believed that the God of the Bible miraculously and supernaturally intervened during the Revolutionary War to give the colonists victory over tyranny. Recall Franklin's request for prayer during the Constitutional Convention.
Jefferson wrote a manual on Christian ethics to civilize the terrorists ("Indians") on the Western frontier. His manual is today called "The Jefferson Bible." More on Franklin, who definitely would not identify with the efforts of secularists to strip religion from the public square. Franklin proposed a Day of Fasting in Pennsylvania, which a true believer in the Everson-ACLU version of "separation of church and state" would never do. He proclaimed: and he prayed that The public nature of Franklin's prayer runs counter to the ACLU's version of "separation of church and state," and no Deist believes that God "interposes" and "confounds" and "defeats" any undertaking of human "free will." This is not the act of a Deist (as the word is popularly understood). In 1749, Franklin wrote:
Tim LaHaye is panting for a "deistic" Theocracy like Franklin's. |
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Wills and Nussbaum counter these claims. Wills argues that the history of religion in America is the history of a productive tension between the head and the heart, between enlightenment (which he counts as a religion) and Evangelicalism, a balance kept in check by the separation of church and state. Nussbaum, in a careful, nuanced, and compelling analysis, identifies religious equality as the crucial American tradition. Two more new books by members of the “religious left” adopt a more strictly biographical approach. “So Help Me God: The Founding Fathers and the First Great Battle
Over Church and State |
"religious equality?" Recall Madison's words in defense of Christianity and against "false religions." Does America really stand for the proposition that the religion of Mother Teresa and the religion of Osama bin Laden are equal? America's religion is not the religion of Osama. Madison said "the unerring precept of our holy religion [is] to do to others as they would require that others should do to them." | |
| It’s probably impossible to discover precisely what the Founders believed about God, Jesus, sin, the Bible, churches, and Hell. They changed their minds and gave different accounts to different people: Franklin said one thing to his sister Jane, and another thing to David Hume; Washington was a vestryman at his church, but, as he lay slowly dying, he never called for a clergyman. This can make them look like hypocrites, but that’s unfair. They approached religion in more or less the same way they approached everything else that interested them: Franklin invented his own; Washington proved diplomatic; Adams grumbled about it; Jefferson could not stop tinkering with it; and Madison defended, as a natural right, the free exercise of it. | I take second place to nobody in being a religious fanatic. Please don't call for a clergyman in the event of my death. Washington's "first official act" was an act of Theocracy, acknowledging God's sovereignty over the government, and the duty of the government to submit to that authority. Adams followed with explicitly Trinitarian proclamations, and Madison's Theocratic Administration would never have passed muster with the ACLU. | |
| Waldman, Church, Nussbaum, and Wills have written very different books—Wills and Nussbaum range both farther and deeper—but each, striving for evenhandedness, wants to save us from the errors of partisans and zealots. “The culture wars have so warped our sense of history that we typically have a very limited understanding of how we came to have religious liberty,” Waldman writes. They also generally agree about the source of the myths that plague us: “the cherry-picking of Founding Father quotes to prove almost anything,” as Waldman puts it. “Champions on both sides,” Church writes, “will claim the words and actions of the founders as proof texts for the righteousness of their moral, political, and religious agendas.” | Christians who want government to impose their views, and Secularists who want government to impose their views both "cherry-pick" the evidence. | |
| The four books achieve a kind of consensus in four related lines of argument. First, the United States was founded neither as a Christian nation nor as a secular one. Second, by the standards of Evangelicals of both their day and ours, Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison were not Christians; they wrestled, often profoundly, with religious questions, but, as Church points out, “they all doubted the divinity of Christ.” Third, the disestablishment of religion is itself responsible for Americans’ unusual religiosity, which (these writers all believe) is something to celebrate. Fourth, notwithstanding the Founders’ own remarkable secularism, the liberation of religion from government as much as the reverse was their aim. “The separation of church and state has greatly benefited religion, as Madison and Jefferson predicted that it would,” Wills writes. Nussbaum argues that because “the separation of church and state is, fundamentally, about equality, about the idea that no religion will be set up as the religion of our nation,” in the end “separation is also about protecting religion.” Waldman writes, “Madison, I suspect, would . . . be delighted by surveys showing that, compared with most developed nations, Americans believe in God more, pray more, and attend worship services more frequently.” |
What does "neither Christian nor secular" mean? A person who "doubts the divinity of Christ" can still, for political purposes, impose a tyrannical Christian theocracy if he has the political power to do so. All of those men named by Lepore created a libertarian Christian Theocracy for the vast majority of Americans who did not doubt Christ's divinity. The modern secular "disestablishment" mocks true religion and isolates religion into a cultural petrie dish where it mutates into wacko cults. Nobody I know opposes the separation of state and church (i.e. "ecclesiastical bodies"). Nobody who signed the Constitution believed in "the liberation of religion [Mason's "duty to acknowledge the Creator"] and government. Madison would be despondent or angry at the illiterate quality of religion today. More is worse. Madison the seminary student would be appalled at the state of religion today. |
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| Because this debate is an argument about how the Supreme Court should interpret the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, people who enter it begin their investigation with the Founders; quite often, they end it there, too. Somewhere along the way, they almost always fall to wondering what James Madison would make of the latest Gallup polls or whether Benjamin Franklin would get along with Christopher Hitchens. That’s how this debate works; that’s the pack of tricks this history plays on the past. The problem is that constitutional jurisprudence, however essential it is to the rule of law, will always tend to produce a history in which the entire eighteenth century is reduced to the intellectual lives of a handful of men. And, because our tradition of constitutional jurisprudence is so important, that history can be all the history most Americans get. Needless to say, it’s a history that leaves out a lot—not least, every other American who ever spread, advanced, or challenged the idea of religious liberty: people like printers turning out newspapers, mothers rearing children, pastors preaching to small towns, and, even, now obscure novelists. Maybe it’s time for another pack of tricks. | Good words in this paragraph, but all negated in the next.
One way to gauge the philosophy of Americans would be to examine the Calvinist school books that educated them, and which they in turn used to educate their own children. The school text that dominated American schools during the founding era was the New England Primer. It was derived in part from the Westminster Standards, which dominated the churches. Richard Gardiner, in his impressive collection of "Primary Source Documents Pertaining to Early American History, lists many sources which introduce the average Secular Humanist to the now-unknown religious foundations of American Revolution and Government. Among these sources are the Westminster Standards. Gardiner says of them:
Compare the education received by and perpetuated by America's Founders with the education imposed (unconstitutionally) on the states by the modern secularist Supreme Court. Start here. Then consider that secularists in Washington D.C. have ruled that the Framers of the Constitution intended to give the federal government the power to prohibit the states from teaching children that the Declaration of Independence is really true. See here. Everything about the modern myth of "separation of church and state" is the exact opposite of what the First Amendment was designed to prevent: federal imposition of a religion antagonistic to that which the states wanted to promote. |
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Royall Tyler was not a Founding Father. He was a prodigal son. But he spoke and wrote about religious liberty all his life—from the pulpit, from the bench, and from his desk. Some scholars argue that the idea of a “wall of separation” between church and state wasn’t built until the eighteen-thirties and forties; Tyler was dead by then, but he seems to have thought that wall had been built at the Constitutional Convention. Nor was Tyler’s life a battle between reason and faith, head and heart. Early and easily, he reconciled his Enlightenment rationalism with his Episcopal faith, although his convictions about both may have been tried during a dissipated youth plagued with disappointments. (His reputation as a rake was not without foundation.) In 1782, when Tyler was twenty-five, he courted John Adams’s daughter. Abigail was charmed. “I am not acquainted with any young Gentleman whose attainments in literature are equal to his,” she wrote to her husband. “I am not looking out for a Poet,” Adams wrote back. The courtship was quietly ended. |
Having just spoken, in the paragraph above, about the need to view American history through the wide-angle lens of a broad cross section of the American people, and the sources that most influenced them, not just a few founding fathers (and always the ones most controversial in their religious views, and least in line with the majority of Americans), our author now seeks to bring forth one additional (obscure) witness.
No new "wall" was built at the Convention of 1787. This is obvious by what happened when the Convention was over and the delegates started walking out the door to a new nation. It is impossible to reconcile "Enlightenment rationalism" with Christianity. Christianity teaches that God is God; "rationalism" teaches that man's autonomous reason is god. |
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| Tyler made more of himself than Adams predicted. In 1787, his comedy “The Contrast” was performed in New York while delegates to the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia. Overnight, Tyler became a literary celebrity. But in an age when no one wanted a poet for a son-in-law he had to earn his keep as a lawyer. He set up practice in Vermont: “If writing for the public is attended with no more profit, I had rather file legal process in my attorney’s office, and endeavor to explain unintelligible law to Green Mountain jurors.” | Is Lepore suggesting that the Constitutional Convention admiringly emulated the political philosophy of Royall Tyler, the playwright? On October 16th, 1778, the Continental Congress passed the following resolution:
Did the Tyler-influenced Constitutional Convention act to remove the Catechism from all common school classrooms? Why does Lepore write about Tyler rather than the "staggering" influence of the Catechism? |
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| Tyler often wished he had chosen the ministry instead of the law, but he was sure that his sinfulness would have been a blot upon the church. (What he meant by his sinfulness is suggested by his 1793 “The Origin of Evil,” a shockingly blasphemous poem about the Garden of Eden.) In Vermont, where ministers were few and far between, he often served as a lay preacher. (After recovering from the Adams fiasco, Tyler married, happily; he and his wife had eleven children, and four of their seven surviving sons became clergymen.) In a sermon that he delivered on Christmas Day, 1793, he offered this prayer: “It is our Blessed Saviour who has caused His day spring of religious liberty from on high to visit us and that we may now worship every man according to the dictates of his own conscience.” | Who was "shocked?" The answer, presumably, is "everybody else in America, a Christian nation."
Religious liberty -- the right to worship according to the dictates of one's own conscience -- originated in pulpits, not from atheists. |
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| Apparently, Tyler agreed with Madison that to establish a Christian religion would be “to foster in those who still reject it, a suspicion that its friends are too conscious of its fallacies to trust it to its own merits.” In “The Algerine Captive,” Updike Underhill’s faith, far from being weakened, is strengthened by his trials. He refuses to convert, even at the cost of his freedom. Nevertheless, one reviewer complained that “in the dialogue with the Mollah, the author too feebly defends that religion which he professes to revere.” Tyler was blindsided by this charge. Invoking Islam to argue for religious liberty was an eighteenth-century commonplace, practiced by writers as different as Johnson, Montesquieu, and Voltaire. “The Author was prepared to meet severe criticism on his style,” Tyler later wrote, “but certainly he never imagined it was objectionable on the score of infidelity, or even skepticism. The part objected to, as far as the Author recollects, was written with a view to do away with the vulgar prejudices against Islamism.” Tyler used Islam as an object lesson in the importance of religious tolerance and the dangers of theocracy. Underhill is both fascinated by and sympathetic to Islam. Even before travelling to Mecca and Medina, he concludes, “I cannot help noticing it as extraordinary, that the Mahometan should abominate the christian on account of his faith, and the christian detest the Mussulman for his creed; when the koran of the former acknowledges the divinity of the christian Messias, and the bible of the latter commands us to love our enemies.” Above all, Tyler used Islam to argue that faith, all faith, must answer to reason. In his view, this was Islam’s great failing: that every Muslim is “tenaciously attached to his own creed, makes his faith a principle in life, and never suffers doubt to disturb, or reason to overthrow it.” |
I know of no Muslims who believe that Jesus is God. Here is one who does not. Where is one who does? Tyler was apparently very confused. |
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| Yet Tyler made his mullah both generous and broad-minded. After weeping for Underhill, a man he can see only as an infidel, the mullah becomes his fast friend and, eventually, helps him escape. The actual end of Algerine captivity was more complicated, but it, too, depended on eighteenth-century ideas about religious tolerance. In June of 1797, just three months before Tyler’s novel was published, the American captives in North Africa were freed by the Treaty of Tripoli, signed by President John Adams. The treaty’s Article 11, an assurance that the United States would not engage in a vengeful holy war, read, “As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian Religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.” | Article 11 is not found in all copies of the Treaty. It was indisputably removed when the Treaty was re-negotiated a few years later. The diplomat who negotiated the first treaty was an apostate clergyman named Joel Barlow, who did not know Arabic. The treaty was translated into English sometime in Jan-Feb 1797, probably by an Algerian court official. The translation Barlow submitted with a signed statement that "The foregoing is a literal translation of the writing in Arabic" is way off the mark. A better translation was made in 1930 by Dr. C. Snouck Hurgronje of Leiden, and is found in Charles I. Bevans, Treaties and Other International Agreements of the United States of America, 1776-1949 (United States Department of State, 1974) vol. XI at 1073f. See the translation of
Article 12. It differs markedly from Barlow's.
On Article 11, Bevans has the following:
In 1783 the US and Britain ended the war with the Paris Peace Treaty. The treaty was written by John Adams, John Jay, and Ben Franklin. Its very first words are
http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/diplomacy/paris.htm America was a Christian nation, as the Supreme Court would note many times during the 19th century. |
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| In 1801, Tyler was elected to Vermont’s supreme court. (He subsequently served as chief justice.) In a case brought before his bench the following year, he rejected as legally invalid an out-of-state bill of sale for a slave. (In 1791, Vermont had been the first state to adopt a constitution prohibiting slavery.) “Would your honor be pleased to tell us what would be sufficient evidence of my client’s ownership of this man?” the lawyer asked the judge. “Oh certainly,” Tyler answered wryly. A bill of sale “from the Almighty.” | By negating a contract in the name of a Higher Law and a Higher Judge, Judge Tyler is a practicing Theocrat. | |
| In 1817, galled by the debate in Connecticut, a state still clinging to an established religion, Tyler prepared for publication a treatise titled “The Touchstone; or a Humble Modest Inquiry Into the Nature of Religious Intolerance.” Here, again, he argued, “A State Religion always has, and ever will be intolerant.” | Every state has a religion. A state church is never necessary for a state to be a Theocracy. A State cannot tolerate everything. Every state punishes "treason." The religion of the State determines what gets punished. | |
| Toward the end of his life, Tyler began an autobiography. He addressed it to a reader two centuries in the future, in the year 2025: “I cannot but fancy that some profound antiquary of your superexcellent age, while groping among the rubbish of time, may from some kennel of oblivion fish up my poor book.” We would make of it, he was certain, at once too much and too little. It would be as if only his left shoe had made it down to the twenty-first century, “to be gathered as an invaluable treasure into the museum of the Antiquarian.” Some historians, “after vainly essaying to fit it to the right foot, would gravely declare that the anatomy of their ancestors’ pedestals differed from those of their day.” But just because we’ve only found the one shoe doesn’t mean eighteenth-century Americans had two left feet.
Having fished up his book, what should we, in our superexcellent age, make of it? Tyler conjured a future reader who smiles at
The sprawling letters, yellow text, |
The legal significance of Tyler is at best ambiguous. Would he have approved of the following rulings by the modern secular federal government:
Numerous other absurdities have stemmed from the courts’ “separation” doctrine:
Examples from David Barton, Original Intent Not a single person who signed the Constitution intended to give the federal government the power to impose this kind of Godless secularism on the states. The Constitution simply would not have been ratified if this power had been understood by the 13 Christian Theocratic states. |
