RELIGION’S INFLUENCE WAS NOT without further paradox, because most of the Founders—certainly the most influential Founders—were themselves not especially religious. Some major Revolutionary figures were devout Christians—John Witherspoon and Benjamin Rush immediately spring to mind—but many others were not, among them Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Adams. An engineer of the American Enlightenment as much as he was of American independence, Franklin possessed a warm, ecumenical spirit that was almost totally devoid of spiritual content. Though he admired the morality of Jesus and believed in an Almighty God, Jefferson doubted Jesus’s divinity and loathed institutional religion as a profane, earthly artifice that came between humanity and the heavens and kept the people subservient to the clergy. Despite receiving an education grounded in religious ideas and values as a student at Princeton, James Madison felt much the same. A nominal Presbyterian and proto-Anglican for much of his life, Alexander Hamilton found true faith only in his later years. Finally, having grown up in the “Bible Commonwealth” of Massachusetts—and to an old, established Puritan family who had crossed the ocean in the 1630s, no less—John Adams simply could not escape his religious heritage; in addition, his father-in-law was a Congregationalist minister. But Adams wore his religion lightly, often skeptically, and found in it a source of ideas, values, and useable history rather than spiritual comfort.1
Of the principal architects of American independence, Washington was the most fervently religious, but his Anglican faith was hardly conventional. He almost never spoke of Christ, had little interest in even the most rudimentary aspects of theology, and rarely attended church. Though he neglected Jesus, he paid inordinate attention to the role of God as the “Governor of the Universe.” But neither was he a deist, one who believes in a distant God, a heavenly watchmaker who created the world and has stood back ever since. Instead, Washington’s God—America’s God—was a providential Supreme Being who regularly intervened in the world on behalf of the righteous and the virtuous.2
Yet despite all their skepticism and eccentricity, religion mattered to the Founders nonetheless. They may have been agnostics, deists, or spiritually vacuous, but they lived in an era and in a nation in which religion played a central role in politics and culture. As the historian Robert Middlekauff puts it, many of the Founders “may not have been moved by religious passions. But all had been marked by the moral dispositions of a passionate Protestantism. They could not escape this culture; nor did they try.” Though products of Enlightenment rationalism, they still worked with, not against, the religious currents of their time and place. They also freely used biblical ideas and scriptural passages to popularize and justify their political views. For all their knowledge of classical, Renaissance, and Enlightenment philosophy, they also appreciated that the Bible—the most widely read and deciphered book in the colonies—contained the Western world’s most extensive discussions of equality and liberty. They epitomized the “religious Enlightenment.” One of the secrets to their success, in fact, was their early recognition that faith and modernity were two sides to the same American coin, complementary rather than contradictory. Thus the pursuit of religious liberty mattered as much to Jefferson and Madison as did political liberty—indeed, in their minds the two were inseparable. Nor did they try to eliminate religion or reduce religion’s influence upon Americans—quite the opposite, in fact, as the Founders, Jefferson and Madison included, were unanimous in believing that religion had a constructive role to play in American political culture.3
RELIGIOUS ATTITUDES mattered in war and diplomacy, too, but in more indirect and subtle ways. Despite the eccentricities of the faith of the Founders, religion was an integral part of colonial American politics and culture. Many of the Founders, even those who were not conventionally devout, sought to infuse politics with religion, but even those who did not found it impossible to avoid the religious influence. In particular, by fusing their Revolutionary objectives with the common fires of faith, the Founders crafted three libertarian principles that would have a lasting impact upon the conduct of U.S. foreign policy: unilateralism, republicanism, and separationism.
Dislodging the British proved to be more difficult than the Americans initially appreciated. Perhaps they were thinking of New England’s improbable success in capturing the mighty fortress of Louisbourg in 1745; perhaps they assumed that because they had God and right on their side, they would conquer an ostensibly superior enemy. Whatever the reason, the Patriots began the war with a certain misplaced—or at least not entirely justified—confidence. Though the first years of the war were not a complete disaster, and though they recorded significant victories at Trenton and Princeton, Washington’s forces suffered several humiliating defeats in New York and Canada that stalled the drive for independence. It was clear they needed outside help. And in a North American war against the British, who better to turn to than France? The French were certainly willing, but in 1776 they did not feel able to take on the British in tandem with a ragtag bunch of rebellious colonists. Loans and supplies made their way from France to America, but little else; and what the French did send was never enough. But in October 1777, the Americans’ stunning victory over the British at Saratoga transformed the diplomatic climate, and with it the war. The ragtag bunch proved they could fight. Thus while Saratoga did not ensure Britain’s defeat, it did prevent America’s. Most important, it made an alliance between the French and the Americans possible.4
Culturally as well as militarily, this was a surprising turn of events. Protestant Britons, especially the American colonists, had demonized the papist French for the past two centuries. France represented the tyranny of superstition and ignorance—how could the enlightened, godly people of America put their fate in Catholic hands? In truth, there was little debate about whether to ally with France simply because the rebels’ situation was still desperate, even after Saratoga. As Benjamin Franklin said at the time, the colonies had been “forc’d and driven into the Arms of France.” Thus in February 1778, with the Americans in need of a partner and the French convinced they could use the Americans to wound the British, Benjamin Franklin and the Comte de Vergennes, the French foreign minister, concluded a Treaty of Alliance with the aim of severing the colonies’ ties to Britain forever.5
Still, a virulent strain of anti-Catholicism lingered in the colonies, and while there was little protest over the alliance with France, it caused discomfort nonetheless. After all, only a few years had passed since the 1774 Quebec Act, which guaranteed Catholic rights in the British-held province and had been one of the American colonists’ main grievances leading them to revolt. And even after the partnership was announced, riots broke out between ostensibly allied French and American sailors based in Boston Harbor. John Adams could never let go of his own suspicions of Catholicism because he could never quite separate the sources of political and ecclesiastical tyranny. In Catholic countries, he explained in a 1761 diary entry, “the gross Impostures of the Priesthood” kept the people under the “Yoke of Bondage. But in Protestant Countries … Freedom of Enquiry is allowed to be not only the Priviledge but the Duty of every Individual.” Many years later, he told his daughter-in-law Louisa that “Liberty and Popery cannot live together.” John Dickinson, the legendary “Pennsylvania Farmer” whose Revolutionary War writings promoted the American cause but who also hesitated when it came to outright independence, worried that the Americans were helping to turn France into the dominant power in Europe. “Suppose we shall ruin” Britain, Dickinson wondered. “France must rise on [Britain’s] Ruins. Her Ambition. Her Religion. Our danger from thence. We shall weep at our victories.” John Jay, a descendant of Huguenots who had fled Catholic persecution in France for the safety of America, felt the same. Such reservations did not trump the advantages of a French alliance, but they did make the Americans tread carefully.6
With all this in mind, Adams set to work drafting a template for foreign alliances, now and in the future. The result was the Model Treaty, an often overlooked document that was never used but nonetheless codified, for the first time, the objective of unilateralist independence in American diplomacy. An alliance was a necessity, and necessity is the diplomat’s most important virtue. But the Model Treaty also aimed to keep foreign powers—namely, France—at arm’s length. Focusing mostly on free trade as the foundation for durable peaceful relations as well as the source of the Revolution’s immediate needs, Adams deliberately rejected the forging of political ties, hosting foreign troops on American soil, or establishing a permanent alliance. Of France, Adams insisted that Congress “Submit to none of her Authority—receive no Governors, or officers from her.” Facts on the ground would override Adams’s concerns. But such facts were temporary; principles were abiding. Adams did not create the American fear of entangling alliances or faith in unilateralism that flowed from much deeper fears of Catholic tyranny or absolutist monarchy; he merely reflected them. In turn, his Model Treaty established a precedent of diplomatic independence that George Washington later sanctified in his influential 1796 Farewell Address. Not until 1949, with the creation of NATO, would the United States join a permanent foreign alliance.7
AS EARLY AS 1763, Patriots—or those who would become Patriots—had criticized British colonial rule with steadily increasing frequency and ferocity. By the war’s first skirmishes in Lexington and Concord a dozen years later, this criticism had developed into a sophisticated, cohesive political ideology that stressed the sanctity of individual liberty from arbitrary, ineffectual, and unjust rulers. The clergy had played a vital role in forming the Patriot response, both in terms of forming an argument to counter British rule and in mounting a violent challenge to overthrow it. But as any body of opposition knows, it is one thing to criticize, another thing entirely to win the argument and then be responsible for creating a new political order. This was precisely the difficult position in which the architects of independence found themselves in 1783: how would the colonies replace the unity, stability, and prosperity of Britain’s imperial governance? And how would they collectively protect themselves and safeguard their interests in a world of hostile foreign powers?
Though it would take eight agonizing years to complete, the answer, of course, was the construction of a democratic, federal republic. And part of the answer—a large part—came from Protestant history and doctrine. This does not mean that the Founders sought to establish a Christian republic or that they envisioned America as an exclusively, immutably Christian nation. Most of the Founders, especially the most important contributors to American political thought, were men of the Enlightenment, rational empiricists who disdained what they disparagingly thought of as religion’s superstition. Rationalists in religion as well as politics and science, most of them ridiculed the emotional excesses of revivalism and evangelicalism. With the notable exception of Jefferson, most were not hostile to organized religion, but indifferent. Yet most Americans at the time were not at all indifferent; even Jefferson appreciated the salience and relevance of Christian faith in American culture and politics. Religion could not simply be ignored.8
Not for the first or last time in American history, religious and political ideas combined to form a powerful, irrepressible ideology: Christian republicanism, a blend of Protestant theology and democratic politics. Republicanism had other sources than Christianity. The political thought of ancient Rome that Renaissance philosophers had retrieved and revived was vital, as was the liberalism of John Locke. But in America, classical and liberal ideas about republicanism could not have been as effective or broadly accepted had Patriots not ingeniously wedded them to Christianity. It was this amalgam of diverse ideas, religion included, that endowed American republicanism with such strength.9
Christian republicanism had two components that were identical to classical, or what might be called “secular,” republicanism. The first was the most obvious: sovereignty should be vested in the people and their duly chosen representatives, not in a hereditary monarch. Even the most benevolent, enlightened king could, in theory, act solely according to his desires. Thousands of people thus relied purely on the whim and favor of a single individual’s arbitrary rule. Without them necessarily realizing it, this idea provided the colonists with the notion that they were “slaves” living under British “tyranny,” despite their relatively high levels of freedom and autonomy. It also led them to conflate the “arbitrary” concentrated power of the Roman Catholic Church with that of George III, the British Parliament, and the Church of England. The second component was less apparent but just as important: if they were not to descend into anarchy and tyranny, a sovereign people had to be a virtuous people. Without virtue and its attendant benefits, American politics simply could not function.
For most political philosophers of the early modern world—and indeed, for many since—Christianity and republicanism could not coexist, let alone combine to form a stable political system, because they seemed inherently at odds with each other. As the Loyalist Anglicans illustrated, traditional views assumed that Christianity demanded obedience to divinely empowered authority; republicanism demanded precisely the opposite. But deference to authority was commonly found in other strands of Protestantism, too—even a revolutionary spirit like John Calvin decreed that individuals had neither the right nor the responsibility to defy those in power. Moreover, tradition also held that Christians owed their ultimate allegiance to God, and in turn to God’s political representative on earth, the sovereign monarch. Most thinkers followed these assumptions and concluded that a republic could not exist with a strong Christian dimension.10
If American Christianity had been so hierarchical, it is plausible it would have been in conflict with republican liberty. But American religion was in fact not rigidly hierarchical; the Great Awakening had radically diffused and dispersed ecclesiastical authority in the 1740s, and even those denominations that rejected or escaped the revivals still had to contend with a much different religious landscape afterward. Even earlier, by 1700, Britain’s North American colonies constituted one of the most pluralistic religious societies on earth. Almost every variety of Protestantism, smaller communities of European Catholics and Jews, and Native American and African faiths all lived alongside one another in the colonies. This diversity emerged in an entirely ad hoc fashion and stemmed mostly from the uncoordinated, often disorganized, and proprietary nature of British imperialism in the seventeenth century. Even in Massachusetts and Connecticut, undeniably hierarchical and nearly theocratic societies until the 1680s, Baptists and Quakers vied with Puritans for the colonists’ affections. When the non-Puritan churches were persecuted, they could escape to nearby Rhode Island or New York and worship freely there. Thus geography and diversity combined to create a Christian world where religious autocracy was difficult to sustain.11
Yet even within those colonies that were for a time tightly controlled, republicanism thrived. Puritan New England, after all, had supported Oliver Cromwell during the English Civil War of the 1640s and despaired of a king, Charles I, who embraced ecclesiastical authority with such passion that Puritans suspected him of secretly being a Catholic. Puritans on both sides of the ocean were also suspicious, if not dubious, about Charles’s claim to a divine right of kings, which struck them not only as dictatorial but blasphemous. In so doing, English revolutionary propagandists provided a counterargument to the apostle Paul’s command that Christians obey authority. It was, in fact, this rich republican legacy that helped provide anti-British Patriots with a solution to the riddle of Christian republicanism in the 1770s and 1780s. By the time of the Revolution, this legacy had been widely accepted throughout the colonies, even when it was not acknowledged as such. Instead of seeing Christianity and republicanism as contradictory, Patriots argued that Christianity instead provided the basis for republicanism. Christians owed their ultimate allegiance to God, and nothing should come between them. A king, particularly one who interposed himself between heaven and earth by ruling arbitrarily and unjustly, stood between the Lord and the people. Thus two doctrines emerged to justify revolution: the Bible stated that people received their natural rights from God, and from God alone; the Bible also laid the foundations for each side, ruler and ruled, to abide by the terms of a covenant, and that if the king violated the covenant’s terms he automatically forfeited his right to rule. Neither doctrine bode well for monarchical authority in Revolutionary America.12
One of the most important links between the Puritan republicanism of the English Civil War and the Christian republicanism of the American Revolution was the poet John Milton. A propagandist for both republicanism and reformed Protestantism, in the decades during and following the Civil War Milton articulated a theory of politics that the American Founders accepted and adopted. Like them, Milton joined British American colonists in damning Anglican bishops as an affront to civil and religious liberty. And like them, he believed that people automatically lived a life of enslaved servitude if they lived at the mercy of a single individual, especially one not chosen by the people and their representatives. Milton also believed that laws and rights, duties and privileges had been devised by God, not kings. “Shalt thou give law to God,” he wrote in his epic poem Paradise Lost,
shalt thou dispute
With him the points of liberty, who made
Thee what thou art, and formed the powers of heaven
Such as he pleased, and circumscribed their being?
Finally, Milton believed that ecclesiastical corruption aided and abetted monarchical tyranny, and that secular authorities could not function properly without being propped up by the tyranny and superstition of an unreformed church, such as the Catholic or Anglican churches. In Milton’s day, the excesses of Charles I and Bishop Laud, justified in the name of the divine right of kings, illustrated the need for both republican government and reformed religion. In the early 1650s, with Charles executed and the Church of England humbled, and a republican Commonwealth established in their place, Milton exulted in his conviction that “the most praiseworthy of all mortals [are] those who imbue the minds of men with true religion, even more to be praised than those who founded, with whatever distinction, kingdoms and republics according to human laws.” To a political and religious reformer such as Milton, only a republic could safeguard the people’s political and religious liberty.13
Not coincidentally, Milton happened to be one of the colonists’ favorite writers, and Paradise Lost one of their favorite works. As a writer, Milton had few equals in the English language; at the time, perhaps only Shakespeare was as esteemed. But Milton’s faith and politics also strongly appealed to the colonial philosophers, politicians, and activists who pushed for independence from Britain. It was his epic Christian poetry and the republican ideas of his contemporaries that fostered an “ideology of dissent” handed down from English revolutionaries to American. Adams, Washington, and especially Jefferson cited Milton to justify or explain their political views, and they applied Miltonic history and philosophy to their own revolutionary times and republican ambitions. Even more than the Founders, the Patriot clergy advanced Miltonic ideas about Christian republicanism and made them indispensable to the structure of American politics. One of the only groups in colonial society that could transcend divisions of class and region, the Patriot clergy argued to a wide audience that the British monarchy was unjust because it had exceeded its authority, abused its power, and placed its illegitimate rule between the people and their God. Their message was clear: the only legitimate kings who could rule absolutely were God and Jesus; everyone else needed the consent of the people.14
But liberty provided only half of the republican formula; the other was virtue. Without virtue, a republic could not properly function. It would, like all other forms of human government, descend into tyranny and cease to be a republic. And the best source of virtue was not commerce or politics, but religion; indeed, the benefits of commerce and politics flowed from an uncorrupted faith. One thing Americans could agree upon was that they could pledge allegiance to a monarchy of God and Christ. As John Jay pointed out in the Federalist papers, religious faith provided a common denominator for Americans, a people united in “professing the same religion.” Though it had the virtue of being a sincere reflection of his own beliefs, this was the reason Washington referred to God in ambiguous terms—“Governor of the Universe,” “Higher Cause,” “Great Ruler of Events,” “All Wise Creator,” “Supreme Dispenser of all Good”—to which no American could object.15
THE RISE OF Christian republicanism, especially its virtuous foundations, was of course integral to the emergence of American politics. But it also marked an important development in the birth and early development of American foreign relations. In a very modern sense, Americans believed that a state’s internal character influenced its external behavior. In other words, nations that were corrupt within would behave rapaciously toward other nations. The British had threatened the Americans’ liberty and security because they had become corrupt and tyrannical. Though the English themselves had learned this lesson at the hands of Spanish and French Catholics, they had clearly forgotten it; the Americans had not. Virtue, then, was not simply its own reward; it was a valuable predictor of state behavior in the international system. Echoing Montesquieu and anticipating Kant, this aspect of America’s Revolutionary republicanism marked one of the earliest formulations of what has come to be known as “the democratic peace,” or what Madison called “the universal peace”: driven by the grandiose ambitions of kings and queens, monarchies were aggressive; restrained by the peaceful, agrarian, commercial desires of the common people, republics were not.16
This truly revolutionary idea did not just diagnose problems, it also offered a cure. If Americans could not feel safe in a world without republican virtue, the solution was obvious: spread the virtue and its attendant blessings of liberty—which to many Americans also meant the spread of Christianity. “It is only necessary for republicanism to ally itself to the Christian religion to overturn all the corrupted political and religious institutions in the world,” Benjamin Rush predicted to Jefferson in 1800. “I think we have reason to conclude,” the Reverend Abraham Keteltas preached from the pulpit in Newburyport’s Presbyterian Church, above the resting place of George Whitefield,
that the cause of this American continent, against the measures of a cruel, bloody, and vindictive ministry, is the cause of God. We are contending for the rights of mankind, for the welfare of millions now living, and for the happiness of millions yet unborn.
…It is God’s own cause: It is the grand cause of the whole human race, and what can be more interesting and glorious. If the principles on which the present civil war is carried on by the American colonies, against the British arms, were universally adopted and practiced upon by mankind, they would turn a vale of tears into a paradise of God.
Keteltas was prescient indeed, as Indians, Canadians, Mexicans, Cubans, Filipinos, and others were to discover in the next century, although their vale of tears rarely disappeared as a result.17
But those living outside America’s virtuous circle would not have to wait that long. America’s clergy, the Revolutionary War’s most able propagandists, carried the mission with them into battle. Reverend Ammi Robbins, a Connecticut chaplain with the force invading Quebec in 1776, exulted in the “pleasing views” as he and the troops crossed into foreign territory, “of the glorious day of universal peace and spread of the gospel through this vast extended country, which has been for ages the dwelling of Satan, and reign of Antichrist.” A chaplain with the Virginia Brigades in Washington’s camp at Valley Forge, writing rhyming poetry to boost morale, went further still:
AMERICA shall blast her fiercest foes!
Out-brave the dismal shocks of bloody war!
And in unrival’d pomp resplendid rise,
And shine sole empress of the Western world!18
From the outset, the Revolution created a character of American foreign relations that was deeply rooted in religious ideals.
JUST AS SIGNIFICANT was the Founders’ decision to ensure the separation of church and state in the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights. The same common denominator of faith that was so vital to republicanism also made the disentangling of faith and politics a national priority. And as with republicanism itself, the unfolding of the Revolution gave shape, color, and meaning to what had before been an abstract idea.
Though the Founders squabbled constantly about many things, they were nearly unanimous on the importance of religious liberty. Whether they were devout believers or Enlightenment skeptics, whether they would become Republicans or Federalists, they all agreed that a republic could not function properly if it did not safeguard this fundamental principle. Religion was more than a matter of faith; it was a matter of conscience. The relationship between people and God was among the most personal and individual. It was also one of the most private and inviolable sources of ideas and values. To interfere with a person’s religion, then, was to intrude into the deepest recesses of their mind. Almost by definition, this would introduce the very worst sort of tyranny, the kind of papist absolutism that Americans feared. As sources of personal conscience, religious liberty and diversity were indispensable to freedom overall, an argument made by Tom Paine in Common Sense and William Livingston, Patriot governor of New Jersey, in a 1778 speech. Thus even Catholics—and Anglicans and Jews—had a rightful place in the new nation, so long as they did not coerce others into practicing their religion. Preparing for the invasion of Canada in 1775, Washington ordered the expedition’s commanders to “avoid all Disrespect or Contempt of the Religion” of the French. “While we are Contending for our own Liberty, we should be very cautious of violating the Rights of Conscience in others; ever considering that God alone is the Judge of the Hearts of Men and to him only in this Case they are answerable.” He repeated this commitment in a public message to the people of Canada. Later, in an address to a Rhode Island synagogue during his first year as president, Washington boasted that the key to the new republic’s success was that all Americans, regardless of their faith, “possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship.”19
Even before 1776, James Madison believed in the need to separate church from state. As a student at Princeton, his mentor had been the Patriot preacher and educator John Witherspoon, who blended Scottish commonsense philosophy with Presbyterianism and came up with a doctrine of individual rights that stressed the separation of church and state as a safeguard to both religious and political liberty. From Witherspoon, Madison also absorbed the Calvinist doctrine—though without Calvinist faith—of original sin and the inherent depravity of man, a vision that helped shape his views on the political necessity of checks and balances. Once back in his home state, Madison championed the rights of Virginia’s Baptists and other religious minorities—not coincidentally, groups whose support Madison needed in the cause of independence. In 1779, he encouraged his friend Thomas Jefferson in the drafting of the Virginia Bill for Religious Freedom, though the bill never passed. In 1785, Madison authored, anonymously, a pamphlet under the title of “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments” in a successful attempt to stop the reestablishment of religion in Virginia. He did so not from the convictions of his own faith, of which there was little, but because he too believed that religion was the wellspring of conscience, and that if the state could interfere with this, the most personal domain of thought, it could interfere, arbitrarily, in anything. To those who were concerned with the fate of virtue and pushed for the establishment of the Christian faith but not a particular church, Madison retorted that if the legislature could make one establishment one day, it could make another the next. Once down that road, there was little to stop such interference in religious affairs. Madison won this argument, and his “Memorial” became the template for the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom later that year, which in turn provided a model for the establishment and free exercise clauses of the First Amendment. In order to protect the church from the state and the state from the church, Madison enshrined their perpetual separation.20
But separation was a necessity as well as an ideal. Had the Founders wanted to establish a national church or otherwise regulate national religion, they would have had a difficult time doing so—indeed, even at this early time, the breathtaking diversity of the religious landscape would have made it all but impossible. Already the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, an important piece of legislation that paved the way for westward expansion, had guaranteed religious liberty in land still to be politically organized. But even here, in Ohio, the sheer variety of faiths among the settlers made the decision against establishment a foregone conclusion. The Revolution, moreover, had sharpened the edges of pluralism. Authority had been subverted, hierarchy undermined, and establishments weakened in church as well as state. Revolutionary fervor destabilized American politics, and it had the same effect on religion. As one wary New Englander observed, soldiers coming home from the war returned with “looser ideas of religious liberty” and a conviction that they were masters of their own faith. This development should have surprised nobody. After all, these very soldiers had just risked their lives over abstract notions of egalitarianism and popular sovereignty. Who could blame them if they sought to practice what their leaders preached? In many cases, this had been literally true: one of the Patriot preachers’ main themes was freedom from British—namely Anglican—religious tyranny. Yet the effect was to undermine not only the British authorities, but authority in general. The power and glory of the Anglican Church suffered, but so did that of the other major denominations, even the ardently Patriot Congregationalists and Presbyterians. By 1790, only 25 percent of Americans belonged to the once-dominant Anglican and Congregationalist churches, down from nearly half only thirty years before. Less formalistic evangelicals, particularly Baptists, were only too eager to step into this breach and drive the “democratization of American Christianity” forward.21
Moreover, many Patriot clergy outside Massachusetts and Connecticut had made the separation of church and state one of their key objectives. William Tennent, who had done the Continental Congress’ bidding in the Carolina backcountry, agitated for separation during his recruiting drives. Baptists in Virginia did much the same, with Madison defending their efforts. And even within New England, a significant minority pushed for disestablishment. Jonathan Parsons, the minister who had his friend George Whitefield interred in Newburyport, believed that complete religious liberty was a prerequisite for American national unity. For Isaac Backus, a Massachusetts Baptist, the establishment of the Congregationalist Church in some New England states was fundamentally incompatible with the liberties for which Americans fought, indeed, little better than “the abominations of Popery.” At the First Continental Congress in October 1774, Backus met with John and Sam Adams and other members of the Massachusetts delegation to drive home the Baptist call for religious liberty within America, and not just from Britain. How, Backus pointedly asked, was the Congregational establishment any different than the appointment of an Anglican bishop?22
He had a point. And though a few of the states clung to an official church, others were in agreement and dissolved their religious establishments as they became states within a national union free from British control. The dissolution of official Anglicanism in the southern states was not especially difficult, despite lingering sympathies in Virginia even among Patriots such as Patrick Henry. New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania had long traditions of tolerant eclecticism; disestablishment there was never a matter for debate but a simple fact of life. Ironically, the only controversial aspect of separating church from state was the fear that it would lead to the separation of religion from politics. Few Americans—with not even Thomas Jefferson or Tom Paine among them—believed that Christian faith was irrelevant. If the republic was essential for liberty, and virtue was essential for a republic, and religion was essential for virtue, then religion was essential to a healthy republic. Viewed in this light, Patrick Henry’s drive to continue tax support for the churches in post-Revolutionary Virginia had very little to do with lingering affections for the established Anglican Church and everything to do with a perceived decline of public morality that seemed to accompany a decline in morality during the war. Even Backus, the arch-separationist Baptist, conceded that “Christianity is essentially necessary to the good order of civil society is a certain truth.”23
The solution was not to banish religion, or to regulate it, but to encourage it by enabling all Americans to worship as they chose. Religious liberty, freed from government interference: it was a fairly basic but nonetheless revolutionary principle, its genius rooted in the knowledge that religion did not have to be uniform to be vibrant. As Washington put it, “the path of true piety is so plain as to require but little political direction.” The virtues of Christian republicanism did not always lead to disestablishment at the state level. But nationally, nearly everyone recognized that the only way forward was to keep church and state apart.24
The libertarian ethos of disestablishment fit beautifully with James Madison’s theory of government based on the separation of powers, as both Madison and Hamilton themselves recognized. In the very first Federalist, Hamilton launched the defense of the Constitution by arguing that “in politics as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword.” In the more famous fifty-first Federalist, which for the first time elaborated a theory of the separation of powers, Madison wrote: “In a free government, the security for civil rights must be the same as for religious rights.” This also left the states, which may not be as religiously diverse as the nation, to maintain church establishments in order to safeguard public morality, and thus virtue.25
The effects of disestablishment were profoundly ironic: in the abasence of a state sponsor, religion did not wither, but flourished. Even Anglicans—Americanized as the rebranded Protestant Episcopal Church—did not find it especially difficult to integrate themselves into the politics and culture of the United States. They were even permitted to consecrate their own bishop without harassment or protest, as if the Bishops Plot had never happened. But it was the children of the Great Awakening who would benefit most. Unsurprisingly, evangelicals largely became Anti-Federalists in the debates over the Constitution, such was their hostility to consolidations of elite power. They lost that argument, but their presence ensured that religion would continue to be a powerful voice in the new republic. In addition to these evangelical upstarts who would soon dominate American Protestantism, faith-based voluntary societies and even new denominations, such as the Mormons, emerged and thrived in the libertarian climate of the early nineteenth century—even in strongly Federalist Massachusetts, where voluntarism was often seen as a divisive attack on the social fabric and body politic.26
As we shall see in several chapters, the impact upon the new nation’s foreign affairs was equally profound. In politics, religion, and economics, Madison and the Founders feared concentrations of power and, through federalism, church disestablishment, and the free market, sought to diffuse power as widely as possible. It was an ingenious solution to a great political quandary, and its influence was long-reaching. Coming after centuries of anti-Catholicism and a new strain of anti-monarchy, the new political order newly codified a very old and very Protestant tradition of hostility to arbitrary power. In American diplomatic thought and practice, this Protestant libertarian ethic made Americans suspicious about other nations that relied too heavily upon concentrations of power, be they religious (the Catholic Church) or political and economic (the Communist Party). Just as English Protestants in the sixteenth century had lived under the assumption that they could not live safely as the world’s only Protestant refuge, Americans in the eighteenth century assumed they must tread carefully, alone, as one of the world’s only republics. Unsurprisingly, religious liberty became intimately bound with the American critique of concentrated, arbitrary power, and a rallying cry in the centuries to come. Though it would not always determine U.S. foreign policy, it usually helped Americans define who were their friends in the world and who were their foes. This was a most important American revelation.