(RNS) — As this month comes to a close on the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding, it’s worth noting how little the founders talked about religion. And their blithe unconcern evolved into manifest anxiety not so much because of a change in philosophy so much as fear.
Here, for example, is what John Adams had to say in his “Defence of the Constitutions of the United States,” which he wrote between 1787 and 1788 while serving as ambassador to England.
“It will never be pretended that any persons employed in [the designing American governments] had any interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the inspiration of heaven, any more than those at work upon ships or houses, or labouring in merchandize or agriculture: it will forever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses.”
Ten years later, Adams, as president, sounded a different note in a letter to the officers of the Massachusetts militia. “Avarice, Ambition Revenge or Galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net,” he wrote. “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People.”
Similarly, in his letter to the Jews of Newport in 1790, George Washington declared that the “Government of the United States … requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.” But then, in his Farewell Address six years later, he warned:
“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them … And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.”
It was Alexander Hamilton who drafted those words — the same Hamilton who, when asked previously why the customary invocation to God was not included in the Constitution’s Preamble, reportedly quipped, “We forgot it.”
To be sure, there were founders who argued that religious invocations and bonds were necessary features of a well-functioning polity. During the Constitutional Convention, Maryland delegate Luther Martin testily informed his state legislature that “a great majority of the convention” had voted, with little discussion, that there be no religious test for holding federal office — although “there were some members so unfashionable as to think, that a belief of the existence of a Deity, and of a state of future rewards and punishments would be some security for the good conduct of our rulers, and that, in a Christian country, it would be at least decent to hold out some distinction between the professors of Christianity and downright infidelity or paganism.”
What accounted for the subsequent shift in the attitude for the others? The French Revolution.
In her history of the American revolution, published in 1805, Mercy Warren was at pains to demonstrate that the “skepticism and the late appearance of a total disregard to religious observances in France” had in no way resulted from “the democratic struggles” in America. To the contrary: “It may be observed in the character of more modern republics that religion has been the grand palladium of their institutions.”
Simply put, when news of the anti-religious Reign of Terror in 1793 and 1794 reached American shores, it shook the founders’ unconcern with the place of religion in the new thing they had created. Their response was to emphasize the importance of Warren’s palladium. But it’s safe to say that the view that was fashionable in 1787 would in all likelihood have prevailed less easily if the Constitutional Convention had been held a decade later.
It’s worth pondering what this story means for the originalists and textualists who claim that the Constitution should be interpreted strictly according to the intent and the words of its authors. Should it matter if they later changed their minds?
