Devotions to Go Volume # 1 Book

I initially bought this book because I saw a praise blurb on the back from Darryl Hart, author of the book A Secular Faith and promoter of Two Kingdom theology. I thought I would see what he was reading and praising. Moral Minority is a well written book that accomplishes what it sets out to do. Brooke Allen establishes through copious and sometimes very lengthy quotes, that many of our Founding Fathers were very far from orthodox Christianity and had no intention of establishing a "Christian nation". Though Allen only looks at six of the thirty-one signers of the constitution (or six of the fifty-five delegates), she picks six major ones to look at (Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton). Not only that, but the views of these men prevailed at the various debates and one would think that if these were the only six voices of opposition to establishing some kind of shining city upon a hill, they would have been argued down, or at least voted down.

Allen structures her book with each of the first six chapters taking one of the above men as its topic, she then has a chapter on 1787 And Beyond, where she looks the role religion has played in the government, veering more separationist until the late 70's early 80's, around the Year of the Evangelical and Reagan's Year of the Bible. After that she has a chapter on The World That Produced the Fathers, placing them in the enlightenment, skeptical, and deistic world of Voltaire &c. She concludes with appendices, one a letter from Jefferson and another some writings from Madison.

As I said above, the book accomplishes what it sets out to do. In doing so, though, the Founding Fathers come off as offering the same rhetoric we hear from the New Atheists today. Most of them, especially Jefferson, are religious ignoramuses.

I wonder why Allen praises them when anyone with a smattering of basic Christian theology would not make the mistakes and blunders Jefferson did when trying to attack Christian theology. She seems delighted by Jefferson's enlightened skepticism, where he tells others to question everything and place all their beliefs on the table. However, Jefferson forgets to place trust in his cognitive faculties on the table as well. Moreover, those on the left frequently point out the moral deficiencies of the Founders and then use this to critique Christianity. But now the pendulum swings the other way. It turns out that we have reason to give Enlightenment morality the stink eye. One can't have it both ways.

Jefferson, like a two year old, mocks the Trinity because "he doesn't get it." As if there could be no truths the metaphysical distinctions of which are so fine as to surpass the capabilities of a finite mind. This is an extreme rationalism and is philosophically beset with problems. Jefferson also said to subject everything to reason and look at the evidence it has. If none can be found, drop the belief. However, Jefferson constantly referred to the existence of a past and assumed the existence of other minds, neither of which can be proved satisfactory to every (the older Peter Unger, for one) rational mind by use of propositional evidence. I could go on, but the point is that secularists shouldn't be to quick to champion Jefferson as a paradigm of philosophical and religious sophistication since he is rather closer to the backwoods fundies secularists love to hate than they would like to admit. And this is the same with many of the portraits Allen paints.

One more example is Benjamin Franklin. Franklin loathed the religious people who would hold back from getting involved in what Franklin considered to be a good moral cause because of their beliefs. Doctrine is looked down upon, confessing propositions that determine your worldview is shunned (how modernly emergent!). However, Franklin recounts a story about when he came into contact with one George Whitefield. Whitefield was asking for a donation to a children's orphanage. Franklin disagreed with some of the details (like Whitfield's desire to make it a Christian orphanage) and so he refused to give money when Whitfield came asking. Here, Franklin stood by his beliefs on certain matters and let it affect a "good", i.e., the building of an orphanage. This was hypocritical (but it did escape the "critical" eye of Allen). Allen tried to set of the Founders as heroes (evident by her laudatory prose when speaking of them and her condescending prose when speaking of the religious fundamentalist). However, she often makes them come off looking like intellectual children. With a few changes in agenda, style and content, the book could have been called: Bumbling Bafoons: Our Philosophically and Theologically Ignorant Founding Fathers.

Another question (or maybe critique) of the book is that it appears Allen is advocating for a naked public square and thinks this is the view of the Founders. However, as with many things, truth is somewhere in the middle. I certainly don't advocate or argue for a sacred public square, thinking that the Republican party is "Gawds party", but I think the religious nones who advocate for the naked square, and think this was the original intent of the Founders, are wrong. Those advocating for the naked square seem to highlight the "no establishment" part of the first amendment more than, or to the exclusion of, the "no prohibiting of religious freedom" part.

Allen cites Jefferson's refusal to make a national day of Thanksgiving when he was President but leaves out the bit about Jefferson establishing one when he was Governor. When Hugo Black cited Jefferson's letter to the Danbury Baptists, he used it as a pretext to argue that the federal government and the states shouldn't establish a religion, but this was probably not Jefferson's view and was not the view of the majority of the signers. One of the premier constitutional scholars today, Akhil Amar of Yale Law School, makes this point as well and he is no friend of the Right, let alone the Religious Right. So do historians and political science scholars Woods and Gutzman in Who Killed the Constitution.

There's also the oft-debated question of whether secularists are religiously neutral. And there's the question of whether a full-blown legal secularism is in fact historical (Os Guinness has a good discussion of this in his Case for Civility (ch. 5)), or possible (Roy Clouser has a great discussion of this in The Myth of Religious Neutrality). My point with all of this isn't to argue whether a naked public square is right or wrong, but simply to take issue with a simplistic reading of the data. I am a fan of the establishment clause, and a pretty strong reading of it too. Ironically, it is this clause that has made us the most religious nation ever. It's part of why we get to discuss religion in the public square and why Christianity is alive and well in our Philosophy departments, unlike European countries, who had or have established religions. Allen points out that Jefferson went over to France and helped sow seeds for their revolution. But one of France's main problems was its war on religion. Amir (the Yale scholar cited above) points out that Jefferson was an absolutist. He didn't think that the Federal government had anything to say on matters of religion. The French Revolution, however, definitely had some things to say. They turned the streets red with the blood of both king and priest. Thus (one reason for) their failure (says me). So I wonder if Allen was too simplistic, though I grant she wasn't trying to get into this issue (but she had no problems sniping, so I get to snipe back). This is probably one reason Hart liked the book, but then, agreements with Hart aside, I find his assessment of "The Great Experiment" to be on the simplistic side as well.

Getting back to the point, if you are under the illusion that Washington was really the pious chap praying at Valley Forge, or that the Founding Fathers were all confessional, or at least Evangelical (whatever that word means), Christians, then this book will quickly disabuse you of that myth. Is/Was America A Christian Nation? That depends. Certainly many of her citizens profess the Christian religion. It's the majority. But it was never founded to be "A Christian Nation", and the religious beliefs of (some of) the Founders are not what we need "to get back to," since the road of Moralism and Deism lead to hell. I do agree with Hart when he says of Allen's book that it "suggests that if America gets religion the way many advocate, Christianity will suffer." But I would go further: if Secular America gets "skepticism" the way many advocate, Secularism will suffer. If the Founding Fathers Allen looked at are not paradigms of theological and pietistic desiderata (and they aren't), neither are they paradigms of atheological and skeptical desiderata.