American Christianities

American Christianities

If you've wondered whether Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) was right when he said recently that America was founded as a "Christian nation," whether other Republican presidential candidates' views on evolution are electorally relevant, what effect Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's Methodism has on her social views or whether a candidate's stand on abortion must determine your vote, then this is your book.

Wills' argument is that American history has been marked by an oscillation between Enlightenment and Evangelism -- between head and heart. He contends that the fruitful tension between these two poles contributed directly to the U.S. Constitution's single wholly original contribution to the political tradition: "disestablishment of the official creed and separation of church and state." It is precisely this innovative separation, Wills contends, that has allowed religion to flourish in America as it does nowhere else in the developed world. It's also why he finds the hostility toward separation evinced by George W. Bush and the religious right so alarming.

Beginning with the Puritans, whose views and turbulence he outlines with great clarity -- and at great length -- Wills moves through the Great Awakening of the early 18th century and the Enlightenment backlash that followed it. Speaking indirectly to the assertion of McCain and others about the Constitution's purportedly Christian origins, Wills points out that at the time of the founding, historians estimate that only about 17% of Americans professed formal religious adherence, a historic low point. The framers were deists, who believed in a divine providence knowable only through reason and experience and not prone to intervene in the affairs of men.

The reaction of the Great Awakening provided an American Unitarian boost that made Deism the religion of the educated class by the middle of the 18th century. Legal scholar William Lee Miller writes that the chief founders of the nation were all Deists -- he lists Washington, Franklin, John Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton and Paine, though many more leaders of the founding era could be added (Benjamin Rush, John Witherspoon, David Rittenhouse, Philip Freneau, Joel Barlow, Aaron Burr, James Wilson, Gouverneur Morris, Tench Coxe, to name some). Their agreement on the question of God crossed political and geographic lines. Federalist and Republican, North and South, an Adams and a Jefferson, a Hamilton and a Madison -- all were professed Deists.

Wills agrees with Perry Miller's contention that the founders were of a "liberality of spirit which must forever and properly remain a scandal to the rank and file of professing American Christians."

He points out that "[b]elievers in America as a Christian nation do not much like Jefferson the Deist. But they like his Declaration of Independence because of its reference to 'the laws of nature and of nature's God.' Though this was not a legislative document, it is more useful to them than the supreme legislative document of the United States, the Constitution, which . . . does not mention God at all."