The faith of our fathers
Yet the founders never sought to drive religion from the public realm. The words they spoke, the symbols they embraced, and the rituals they established--from state-declared days of thanksgiving to prayers at the start of Congress to military chaplaincies--all made clear that even semiofficial acknowledgment of divine providence was not only acceptable but good. This public piety was distinctly nonsectarian and centered upon what might be called a benevolent theism. But as James Hutson, chief of the manuscript division of the Library of Congress, argues in his Religion and the Founding of the American Republic, whether they were old-line Calvinists or liberal deists, the Founders believed divine will legitimized their institutions and laws and made citizens more willing to respect them. Even Thomas Jefferson, who thought most Americans would become rationalist Unitarians within a generation or two, considered the acknowledgment of providential authority essential to public virtue.
Contrary to Jefferson's rationalist prediction, Americans became even more enthusiastically religious. As University of Notre Dame provost Nathan Hatch shows in The Democratization of American Christianity , during the 70 years after the Revolution, America became an avidly evangelical nation. Baptists, Methodists, and Disciples of Christ not only competed with the older churches but soon outpaced them. "The Congregationalists, which had twice the clergy of any other American church in 1775, could not muster one-tenth the preaching force of the Methodists in 1845," writes Hatch.
The Second Great Awakening further weakened clerical authority and blurred doctrinal lines. Populist, revivalist Christianity spread hand in hand with Jacksonian democracy, bolstering the American creed of liberty, individualism, and equality. At the same time, says Yale historian Harry Stout, "Evangelicalism became the extension of nationalism by other means." Just as western expansion acquired sanction as divinely ordained "Manifest Destiny," other national issues assumed theological dimensions. The fight over slavery pitted abolitionist Christians against pro-slavery Christians, each citing Scripture to support their positions. In his greatest speeches, Abraham Lincoln acknowledged God's providence and sought God's support of the Union.
As the 19th century closed, the Third Great Awakening got underway, this one inspiring many of the Progressive reforms of the era. Whether fighting corporate monopolies or promoting women's suffrage, the reformers, writes Samuel Huntington in his new book, Who Are We?, " stressed the moral necessity of eliminating the gap between institutions and ideals and creating a just and equitable society." Later, civil rights leaders drew heavily on biblical language to attack the last institutional props of racial inequality. Yet even in the late 19th century, social and intellectual developments began to disturb the broad consensus behind America's civil religion. Waves of immigrants--many of them Jewish or Catholic--found America's civil religion too conspicuously Protestant for their own comfort. And as institutions like schools began to receive public funding, many wondered what prayers or even Bible reading was doing in the classroom.
"Unbelief." At the same time, the spread of Darwinian evolutionary principles and new "liberal" interpretations of religious texts sparked a reactive defensiveness among Protestants, with the fundamentalist movement its most militant expression, its leaders deploring a growing godlessness in the public sphere. Battle lines hardened as the 20th century progressed. To many Americans, the Cold War struggle against a militantly atheist ideology required fortification of America's own religiosity. In the Eisenhower era, writes legal scholar Stephen Bates, "Congress opened a prayer room in the Capitol, made 'In God We Trust' the official national motto and required its inclusion on all currency, and added 'under God' to the Pledge of Allegiance."
advertisement
