The world view of the Founders

In our last post, we discussed the Constitution as an extraordinary intellectual achievement by men of extraordinary ability, who had deeply steeped themselves in the lessons of history.  Those lessons were debated, sometimes heatedly, both in the Convention itself and in the ratification debate which followed. It was from the latter that we get The Federalist, itself an intellectual achievement scarcely less than that of the Constitution.

These debates were between men who held a variety of views on man, God, and religion.  By the standards of the day, we might even call them diverse, though the diversity was in philosophy, not in skin color, sex, or other accidental characteristics; the mirror image of diversity as usually defined in academia in our time, which prizes diversity in accidental characteristics but is remarkably intolerant of intellectual diversity. However, there were certain common assumptions underlying the debate that can be discerned in the writings of most of its participants.

Very few outright atheists or agnostics participated in the debate. But neither was there a universal belief among the Founders in a personal God. Thomas Paine was a Quaker turned Deist who rejected all organized religion, was particularly hostile to Christianity, and who favored a Constitution in principle but fiercely opposed the proposed U.S. Constitution in practice as too conservative and insufficiently democratic.  Thomas Jefferson was a complex man with complex views, but was heavily influenced by Deism,  believing in a creator God and an afterlife but denying the divinity of Jesus. His views would fit comfortably in the modern United Methodist Church or the United Church of Christ, or even in many Unitarian churches. But neither Paine nor Jefferson participated in the Constitutional Convention nor in the debate that followed. Both were in France: Paine as a would-be French citizen and revolutionary, and Jefferson as minister to France for the Confederation government. We are unapologetic in regarding this as a blessing for the young United States.

Of those who actually took part in the framing of the Constitution, James Madison wrote little about religion and his views remain obscure. He was undoubtedly acquainted with Deism, but there is some evidence he remained a creedal Christian. Alexander Hamilton was born and died a devout Episcopalian, but there is little doubt he was influenced by Deism in the years between. John Jay was consistently Protestant in his belief and practice during his lifetime, and one regrettable black mark in his otherwise exemplary service to his country was his advocacy of anti-Catholic statutes. This was likely motivated by a sincere if misguided belief that Catholics owed their first allegiance to the Pope, the Prince of Rome, and so had divided loyalties.  Washington, as we discussed in our prior post, was likely a conventional Anglican who spoke the language of Deism because he wished to be President of all Americans, and judged the language of Deism to be the most bland and nonsectarian. Franklin was  born a Puritan, became an enthusiastic Deist in his youth, was later embarrassed by this phase, and died a vigorous proponent of religion generally and of the Christian social and moral system particularly, while remaining agnostic on the actual divinity of Jesus. Edmund Randolph, who proposed the Virginia Plan with its supreme bicameral legislature, seems to have left little record of his religious views other than a firm commitment to religious liberty embodied in the No Religious Test Clause. James Wilson, who largely shaped the Presidency, was complex in his religious views, which included some influence from Deism, but he was likely some form of Christian.

The framers of the Constitution were thus men raised with a Christian worldview that had been partially metasomatized with Deism.  Their Christianity was of a particular form: There were no Jews and only two Roman Catholics at the Constitutional Convention. There were a number of delegates with Quaker roots, but the Society of Friends was still recognizably Christian in that day.  We think it fair to say that Protestant Christianity was the foundation of the Framers’ world view while Deism was their intellectual fashion. They found various ways to reconcile the two, often by emphasizing the social and moral framework of Christianity and the concept of Divine Providence found in some strains of Deism. It was a little like today’s practicing Roman Catholics who embrace evolutionary psychology.

Let us examine these worldviews more closely. A complete exposition of Christian theology is beyond the scope of this post, but it is relevant that almost all branches of Christianity in the Framers’ day regarded Man as fallen. He is the creation of God, with a unique capacity for reason reflected in his ability to discern good from evil, but he is also by nature brutal and venal as a result of the Fall. By brutal we mean that Man displays animal instincts that often overpower his reason. By venal we mean that he is open to corrupting influences, personified in the devil, Satan. In Catholic Christianity, the remedy to Man’s brutal and venal nature is the grace of God administered by the authority, sacraments, and teachings that make up the magisterium of the Church. Protestant Christianity rejected the magisterium, enlarged the role of grace, diminished the role of sacraments, and altogether replaced priestly authority with the authority of the Bible. This encouraged widespread reading of the Bible, which in turn required a high degree of literacy. New England of 1787 had the highest literacy rate in the world, an unprecedented 90% or better among men and 70% or better among women. The South lagged with a literacy rate (in its free population) of perhaps 70% among men and 40% among women, but this was still respectable in the late 18th century. What they read was largely the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare, the two books likely to be found even in less prosperous households, with a leavening among the more well-to-do of classical writings. The mark of higher education in their day was the ability to read and understand Euclid in the original Greek.

It was inevitable that the success of Newtonian mechanics, crowned by the prediction of the return of Halley’s Comet in 1759, would produce something like Deism. Deism rejected revelation in favor of reason and observation, favoring the reading of the book of Nature over the reading of the books of the Gospels. This is not so much a revolution in thought as a change in emphasis, since reading the book of Nature had already been part of Christian philosophy for a very long time. Deism is not an atheistic philosophy per se, but posits a Creator God who set His creation in motion under immutable laws that can be discerned by human reason alone.  The Deism of the Framer’s day was split between a watchmaker God who left His creation entirely alone, and a God who exercised Divine Providence over His work; an invisible Hand that guided human affairs. The former denied all manifestations of the supernatural, while the latter left the door open for the occasional miracle. It is clear from the writings and sayings of the Framers that they mostly belonged to the second camp, to the extent that they were Deists at all.

Many of the Founders were lawyers trained in the English common law, and their writings show almost no inclination to depart from that tradition. Their greatest innovation in statutory law was reducing the seven forms of high treason defined by English statute to the two forms mentioned in the Treason Clause. The Founders believed in natural law, even if they did not always use the phrase, which they understood as the equivalent in human behavior of the natural laws governing the movements of the planets. Just as Newton and his contemporaries had discerned the laws of motion from observation and reason, so courts and legislatures were in the business of discerning the laws governing a flourishing human society through observation and reason. The common law was seen as early steps in discerning the laws of human nature, to be carefully conserved and improved upon with further observation and reasoning.

This implied the existence of natural rights, which are checks on the powers of governments, arising not from the whim of a legislature but from the inherent nature of man. This made natural rights immutable. To the extent possible, the Framers placed such rights beyond the reach of government, amendable only through an onerous process meant to ensure that changes reflected a genuine increase in understanding of something that had been there all along. Manufactured or positive rights were not part of their thinking.

This understanding of natural rights does not actually require a belief in God, and we note that the atheist George Will bases his conservatism on a similar understanding of natural rights.

The Framers were no anarchists. They believed that the brutal and venal tendencies of men must be checked by government. Only by punishing the wicked could the natural rights of the people be protected. Indeed, the reason for calling the Constitutional Convention was that the federal government had proven too weak to adequately protect the rights of its citizens. The Framers also believed, almost to a man (Jefferson and Paine excepted), what was expressed by their German contemporary, Goethe:

I have often felt a bitter sorrow at the thought of the German people, which is so estimable in the individual and so wretched in the generality…

Nothing is more odious than the majority, for it consists of a few powerful leaders, a certain number of accommodating scoundrels and submissive weaklings, and a mass of men who trot after them without thinking, or knowing their own minds.

Or as Kevin D. Williamson put it more recently:

As I walked off, a contingent, apparently believing that we were once again on the move against fascism, began to follow me, pumping their fists and chanting, until they figured out that I wasn’t leading them anywhere. And thus did a National Review correspondent end up briefly leading an Antifa march through Portland.

Of course they followed me. They’ll follow anything that moves.

The Framers’ distrust of mass democracy is reflected in a Constitution that claims its legitimacy from the consent of the people but is consciously countermajoritarian.

The Framers did not rely on government alone to check chaos and preserve rights. Even those who were most influenced by Deism (again, Paine excepted) saw the churches as indispensable to checking the brutality and venality of the natural man. However, the Framers departed from traditional thinking in believing that free exercise of religion, protected from government interference by Jefferson’s famous wall of separation (which was clearly meant to protect the church from the government, not the other way around) was most likely to promote the lively interest in religion that would inculcate public virtue. They also valued education, and took active measures in their private capacities to encourage the growth of schools and universities. We think it a pity that they never thought to build a wall of separation to protect education from the government.

We will see this worldview reflected again and again in the framework of the Constitution.