In our third look at social history in this series, we examine five books addressing religion in Revolutionary Virginia. “Founders on God and Government” shows how religious beliefs influenced views of the republic. “Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion assesses the transformation of Virginia and other colonies from Christian commonwealths to secular republican governance.
“Religion of the Founding Fathers” examines the faiths of six Founders, four of them Virginians, and six of their wives and daughters, five of them Virginians. “Jefferson and the Wall” addresses early efforts to guard against overreaches by either church or state. “Virginia Statute” notes the dominant gentry sought to protect themselves from both dogmatic “priesthoods” and evangelical enthusiasms.
See more reviews on Revolutionary Virginia history at our webpage Revolution-Constitution-New Nation. General surveys of Virginia History can be found at Virginia History Surveys. Virginia history divided by time periods can be found at the webpage Books and Reviews.
The Founders on God and Government
The Founders on God and Government was edited by Daniel Dreisbach, Mark D. Hall and Jeffry H. Morrison in 2004. It is a collection of essays on eight Founders and how their religious beliefs influenced their views of the new republican nation. Four are Virginians: Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Mason. The others are Signers John Adams of Massachusetts, Witherspoon of New Jersey, along with Pennsylvanians Benjamin Franklin and James Wilson.
Here essayists argue that the Founders were religious men, though of varied beliefs, and their Protestant belief system motivated them in their actions constructing the Constitution and establishing the nation. Other influences derived from the political theories of the radical Whigs and Enlightenment were influenced by religion as well. Learn more to buy “The Founders on God and Government” here for your bookshelf.
The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion
The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America was written by Frank Lambert in 2005. It assesses the transformation of colonial variations in Christian commonwealth to adoption of secular republican government where as Adam Smith envisioned in his Wealth of Nations, competition among multiple sects produces the purest religion without any sect gaining legal preference.
In the first chapters, Lambert examines church and state in Elizabethan England, then looks at the failures of the early Virginia, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania establishments. He then turns to the church-state arrangements on the eve of the American Revolution where growing interdenominational pluralism grew up from religiously diverse immigration and the Great Awakening.
Enlightenment ideals and interests of dissenting evangelicals converged to build a consensus in the revolutionary and early nation period that promoted religion as a natural right and a private, voluntary pursuit. The Founders agreed that religion played a useful role in fostering republican virtue, but the appropriate place of religion in governance remained in dispute. Learn more to buy “Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion” here for your bookshelf.
The Faiths of the Founding Fathers
The Faiths of the Founding Fathers was written by David L. Holmes in 2006. The introduction provides colony by colony overview of the great variety among religious sects in colonial British North America and their various church-state arrangements. Holmes then describes several strains of Deism, a belief system neither atheistic nor Christian.
Six chapters delve into the faiths of four Virginians, Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe, along with Benjamin Franklin and John Adams. In general they were respectful of Christianity and religion’s beneficial role in society, admiring of Jesus’ ethics, and open to divine intervention in worldly affairs.
Three orthodox Christians are examined, Samuel Adams, Elias Boudinot and John Jay. A separate chapter is devoted to the more orthodox beliefs of six women who were wives and daughters of Founding Fathers, including five Virginians, Martha Washington, Eleanor Custis Lewis, the two Jefferson daughters Martha and Maria, Dolly Madison along with Abigail Adams. Learn more to buy “Faiths of the Founding Fathers” here for your bookshelf.
Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation
Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation between Church and State was written by Daniel L. Dreisbach in 2002. The book inspects the Revolutionary and New Nation historical context for Jefferson’s famous “wall of separation” between church and state as formulated in his letter to the Danbury Baptist Association of Connecticut in 1802.
Dreisbach describes Jefferson concerted efforts to protect individuals from unwarranted trespasses by church or state. But there was no radical divide meant between society and government as found in Justice Hugo L. Black amounting to a “spite fence”.
The purpose of Jefferson’s caution was to ensure an institutional separation and procedural safeguards for individual conscience in the private sphere. Jefferson’s contemporaries forcefully defended the agency of religion in society to promote civic responsibility and ethical behavior.
Jefferson was neither at the making of the Constitution nor of the Bill of Rights; scholarship parsing Jefferson alone limits conclusions historians can draw. Learn more to buy “Jefferson and the Wall of Separation” here for your bookshelf.
The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom
The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom: Its Evolution and Consequences in American History was edited by Merrill Peterson and Robert C. Vaughan in 1988. Both religious continuities and discontinuities are emphasized in different essays among this collection, along with consideration of the political and constitutional effects of the statute. Various Founders held conflicting assumptions about the requisite virtues in a republican civic culture, from Enlightenment Deists, to “polite evangelical” Presbyterians to righteously angry Baptists. The quest was for amicable relations between church and state so as to avoid the sectarian strife and violence of European history.
In Virginia, the gentry sought to protect themselves against both dogmatic priesthoods of establishment and the revolutionary spiritualism of the evangelical Christian sects. As masters of the words of printed reason the great landowners as lawmakers would retain control of both Virginia, and by the same process, the United States. Learn more to buy “The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom” here for your bookshelf.
See more reviews on Revolutionary Virginia history at our webpage Revolution-Constitution-New Nation. General surveys of Virginia History can be found at Virginia History Surveys. Virginia history divided by time periods can be found at the webpage Books and Reviews.