A Fundamental Disagreement

ED: In other words, when it comes to the faith of American presidents, it’s often hard to untangle religion from the unholy business of politics.

PETER: So today on the show, we’re taking a look at the religious beliefs of the nation’s chief executives, and how those beliefs have shaped the nation’s politics. We’ll look at how Thomas Jefferson won the support of Baptists and other evangelical Christians, despite his unorthodox religious views. We’ll also hear how presidential candidate Al Smith encountered a tidal wave of anti-Catholic prejudice in 1928, and we’ll look at how the evangelical preacher Billy Graham became the spiritual advisor to a dozen American presidents.

ED: But first, Peter, I have a little tape I want to play for you. The first voice is Reverend Franklin Graham on CNN earlier this year. And he’s followed by a panel on Fox News from 2015. Give a listen.

FRANKLIN GRAHAM: You talk about us being a secular government, a secular side, that’s only taken place in the last few years. Our nation was founded on Biblical principles–

MALE SPEAKER: Thomas Jefferson was an atheist. But, like, somehow recently, in the 20th century, everybody think that, like, everything’s a Christian whatever. It never was.

ED: So, Pete, I need a little bit of help here. We seem to be in fundamental disagreement about the fundamental origins of faith in the nation. On one hand, you hear these guys were all Enlightenment figures. And on the other hand, we hear that the nation was founded on Christianity. How would we hold both those ideas in our head at the same time?

PETER: Well, they’re both true, Ed. We have a problem separating the two. The great culture wars of the recent period have pivoted on a notion that the real America is Christian, or the real idea is enlightened, b and devoted to science, and progress, and modernity. And that’s a reflection of our times, not of the times of the revolutionaries and the founders.

In a descriptive sense, most Americans are Christian. In this period, there’s no question about it that religious language is pervasive. It’s part of the common culture. There’s no question about it. But there’s no necessary opposition, just says there is no necessary opposition between faith and science in this period. In fact, a nice way to think about it is natural philosophy, or natural religion, which is the position that roughly describes what George Washington embraces, and Thomas Jefferson, and many of the founders. We often call these people Deists because they don’t obsess about doctrinal distinctions. They instead look at the big picture, as the Enlightenment has taught them to do, and they see the world around a guiding idea that there was a purpose to the American Revolution, and to American nationhood, and a providential purpose. That religious idea, that spiritual idea, it doesn’t entail specific doctrinal commitments. You could be a Quaker. You could be a Baptist.

ED: You could even take a Bible and cut out the parts you don’t like, like Thomas Jefferson did, right?

PETER: Well, many Christians today would say that he’s gutting a essential Christian character. I would say that he’s trying to isolate those elements that he believes all good, faithful, patriotic Americans could accept. What he’s taken out of the Bible are what we might call the ethical teachings of Jesus, The Sermon on the Mount. He doesn’t emphasize miracles, because, you know, if the republic is going to succeed, it’s not because God is regularly intervening. He believed that the republic needed a foundation in an ethical system and in a religion of the people. That makes Jefferson as a president, Washington as a president, very much speaking to a popular religious understanding. They’re not anti-religious. We think Enlightenment anti-religion, secular humanism. That is, there’s no soul. There’s no commitment, but there is.

ED: Well, OK. OK. This is very helpful, because what you’re suggesting is that the president’s following the founding fathers honor religion, but they are not advertising they belong to a certain denomination or sect or whatever, right? So when does this idea shift? I mean, when does it become not OK to have this kind of expurgated Bible, and a kind of miracle-less Christianity?

PETER: The big tent that Jefferson, and other advocates of civil religion, propose allows lots of different variations to flourish, different ways of worship, and different ideas about God and God’s purposes on Earth. And toleration is double-edged, then. It both and encourages a broad consensus, you might see a broad ethical, even spiritual, consensus. But it also encourages diversity, and that diversity can take on sharp edges.

BRIAN: I think it’s even more ironic than that, Ed, and I’ll ask you. Didn’t some of those evangelical Christians go on to question and ultimately disparage that ethical humanism, that more civic religion, that Deism?

ED: Yeah, but then they picked up other great themes of the founding. So this evangelical language, Brian, fueled both the anti-slavery and the pro-slavery ranks of antebellum America. And the way this would look, is that the people who were anti-slavery say, what could be more anti-Christian than not honoring other people as you yourself would be honored? And the people who want to defend slavery say, show me in the Bible where is says slavery is wrong.

So people lay claim to the same Bible that Jefferson had cut up. So it’s interesting how quickly these cycles can come and go. And I think it goes back to what Peter said. We created such a big tent at the founding of the nation that faith in the presidency, and everything else in American history, can take all kinds of shapes and forms.

BRIAN: But Ed, I’m going to press you on the president and faith. I know you’ve spent a lot of time thinking about Lincoln and faith. How does he deal with the great conflict that you describe?

ED: Well, he avoids it for a long time. He’s pretty widely known as not being an orthodox churchmen. I mean, he doesn’t belong to any denomination. He’s not been a famous church goer. But he does meet with ministers during the war, and you can certainly trace, over the course of the Civil War, and increasing reliance on what he calls Providence, and then does call God. He makes the same move that Thomas Jefferson did, you know. He says, I’m not going to talk about specific religious faith, but I am going to invoke the hand of God by saying this war is so mystifying, that it must have been God’s will that both sides sacrifice enough blood to atone for the blood shed in slavery.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

BRIAN: Earlier, we heard from Auburn University historian Adam Jortner. A portion of that interview appeared on our episode “Wall of Separation– Church and State in America.”