James H. Hutson

First, one should always be cautious of any work that essentially posits "I'm right and everyone else is wrong", no matter how scholarly that work sounds. Second, I was dying for this book to be finished because I was tired beyond words of the phrase "nursing fathers". Third, well, third, the author accuses people writing a certain version of the First Amendment of cherry picking from the works of authors that support their view, and ignoring the wider range of ideas; the author himself does this, discussing Thomas Jefferson only in context of a small portion of his prodigious output, and ignoring many of his words or actions that make the concept much more complex. He mentions Madison's "Memorial and Remonstrance" late in the book, and mostly to sneer at it. In addition, the ideas presented in this book really aren't something that no one else is proposing; most the people I read or see speak are quite aware that the early Republic was not a hotbed of freethought or tolerance, but was instead a convoluted mess of competing ideologies, most of which at some point in our history have wanted government sanction for their own particular brand of belief. The author fudges his point, but in the end it appears that he is saying not only that the "wall of church and state" metaphor is inaccurate to describe how most people felt about it, but that it has no place in our jurisprudence, though he stops short of that final statement, letting it stand by implication. Since the author is willing to stretch the same points as many fundamentalists, i.e., the presence of the standard phrase "In the Year of our Lord" meaning that the Constitution is acknowledging God (hardly) and manages to see the restriction against religious tests for office as another way of acknowledging God, I find it difficult to know how much else of his work I can trust. He also mentions that the Constitution provides for "oaths" (which are God-based) and ignores the fact that they also provide for "affirmations" (a Godless alternative). That, coupled with commas scattered in strange places that can make the text difficult to read, a problem with using articles where they are inappropriate, and general overall sloppiness of editing, make this book dubious in my view, though not without some worth for tracing a complicated history. In response to the idea that the early settlers did not want a wall of separation, I am inclined to say "so what?", which should be his argument as well. We have the right to chart our own course through life, as long as it can fit within the boundaries of Constitutional law, and whether someone who has been dead 200 years wanted the entire nation to worship his God or not is irrelevant. Overall, a disappointment, though with good bits in places.… (meer)

William G. McLoughlin, "The Role of Religion in the Revolution: Liberty of Conscience and Cultural Cohesion in the New Nation," in Kurtz and Hutson, eds., Essays on the American Revolution, 197-255.

McLoughlin seeks to put the relationship between religion and Revolution in a longer term context. Taking the longer term view, he is able to discern that the role of religion in the Revolution was "to create religious liberty for Protestantism in order to provide the cultural cohesion for the new nation." (p. 255) In coming to this conclusion he takes us on a wide ranging overview of the religious movement in Protestant Christianity that acted in parallel with the political currents of the times. Understood as a religious as well as a political movement, American Protestant Christianity is indeed the glue that provided cultural cohesion from the Revolution to the dawn of the 20th Century. At no time prior to the 20th century challenge to the revealed truth of the Bible did the glue fail to hold.

For McLoughlin, the American Revolution begins with the Great Awakening. Evangelical Calvinism, deism and radical Whig ideology were all part of a volatile mix that moved the colonies in the direction of rebellion. Together they worked to give general impetus to conceptions of popular sovereignty that allowed the colonists to adopt religious individualism as an underpinning of political individualism. Providing a psychological liberation from the "dysfunctional" imperial regime, radical religious liberty was the source of political liberty.

Standing on nothing but their own common or moral sense of what was right (as God gave them to see the right) Americans engaged as individuals and groups in more and more extensive passive and active civil disobedience, asserting plainly as they could that the powers that be were not in their judgment ordained by God and therefore ought not be obeyed.

Far from conflicting with Enlightenment rationalism in its general effect, pietistic self-righteousness fed the same flame of rebellion.

He proceeds to cite a number of ways in which the pursuit of political and religious liberty proceeded hand in hand leading to the Revolution.

Dissenters protested religious taxation, as politicians also protested commercial taxes.
By refusing to pay religious taxes, New Lights and Separates in New England rehearsed the later refusal to pay civil taxes.
Country Whig ideology and pietistic Calvinism formed a mutually supportive ideology of individual resistance to illegitimate authority.
Cohesion in wartime overcame denominational factionalism.
Patriotism provided a "bridge" for pietism to cross denominational lines and ultimately to bring dissenters into what we would now call the mainstream.
Turning next to the question of how "the universal spirit of the rights of man [became] in the end a new national establishment that excluded non-Protestants from full religious equality" (209), he proceeds to explain why it the new American nation became a Protestant Christian Nation. Coming out of the Revolution, the various denominations and sects of Protestants opposed religious support by government for fear that the government would support the wrong sect. Though there were zealous religious observants, so M., most were "middle of the road" Christians seeking the state's support for religious observance while hoping to avoid the abrogation of religious liberty. It is in this contradiction that the new nation worked out a religious volunteerism that paralleled the political, substituting the mechanisms of laissez nous faire for the dead hand of mercantilism.

Much of M's otherwise interesting and provocative article is given over to a complicated discussion of the "Establishment Debate" in the context of the various constitutional conventions at the state and federal level. General Assessment gave way to its opponents in Virginia first and in many other locales subsequently. It was a difficult debate that aroused intense passions, passions which it is either extremely difficult to recreate in the 21st century reader or which M. is simply unequal to igniting. As disestablishment was achieved on the Federal level it was increasingly also a factor of state life as well.

The debate shifted to the issue of incorporation, at much the same time as the commercial world was only beginning to struggle with the need to regulate new "corporate" interests. How would governmental authority be marshaled to support Protestant Christianity and yet allow for the voluntarism of the various Protestant sects? The authority of the government was invoked to support a general Protestant religious landscape. For instance, as New England churches went to an annual pew subscription system, who would make the wayward congregant pay up if he refused to do so? Incorporation provided the remedy to this problem, but incorporation debates raged as powerfully as general establishment debates, with MA Baptists taking up opposite sides of the issue -- Hezekiah Smith from a wealthy church sought the protection of the law, while Isaac Backus took the opposite approach preferring to keep the government out of spiritual issues. By incorporating the denominations' churches, the new state governments allowed churches remedies at the law for support that had largely become voluntary in the days of the Early National Period. Voluntarism was never pure in the new nation, Isaac Backus to the contrary, as factions supporting governmental aid to religion increasingly succeeding in providing some protections in the new "Christian" nation. By the 1820s, even the Baptists agreed with the Congregationalists that voluntarism was not enough. It was in the Jacksonian era that businesses also began to benefit from general incorporation legislation as well. The American Government thus encouraged "free enterprise" in religion and in business.… (meer)

James H. Hutson has done anyone who writes or speaks about religion a huge favor. By collecting our founding father’s thoughts on more than 70 religious topics, he has offered insight into the extraordinary minds and convictions of the people who founded this country.

Quotations on the after-life, death of loved ones, divorce, child rearing, reliability of biblical texts, Judaism and Islam are offered from founders who range from pious to unorthodox.

Calling on the usual -- and even some unusual -- suspects Hutson offers quotations that transcend time. The utterances prove provocative, warm, funny, heartfelt and wise. Hutson even includes quotations from two founding mothers – Martha Washington and Abigail Adams.

Well-researched, highly-usable and often amusing, this book is a must for history lovers and those who just like to think, write or discuss religion.… (meer)