In the 1830’s a French nobleman named Alexis de Tocqueville spent several months touring the United States, then wrote an influential and popular bookabout what he had learned. Everywhere he went he was struck by the fact that American beliefs about freedom and civil rights seemed to be based in the Christian religion. “Upon my arrival in the United States,” Tocqueville wrote, “the religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention; and the longer I stayed there the more did I perceive the great political consequences resulting from this state of things, to which I was unaccustomed.” Tocqueville went on to say “The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to conceive the one without the other.”

Don’t expect to hear Tocqueville’s words in a typical college history class. The perspective taught in most mainstream history texts is that humanistic philosophies had to unshackle America’s leading thinkers from the Judeo-Christian traditions of Europe before ideas like democracy and human rights could gain any traction.

The View from The Ivory Tower

The three professors¹ who authored the textbook America’s Promise would have us believe that “skepticism about religion” was one of the Enlightenment Age philosophies that inspired the Founding Fathers to declare independence and build a nation on democratic principles.

In the textbook Give Me Liberty, author Eric Foner tells students that during the eighteenth century “Many prominent Americans” adopted the religious view known as Arminianism, and others Deism; and that “Belief in miracles, in the revealed truth of the Bible, and in the innate sinfulness of mankind were viewed by Arminians, Deists, and others as outdated superstitions that should be abandoned in the modern age.”

The Other Side of The Story

Dr. Foner is flat wrong when he puts Arminianism in the same category as Deism, but his characterization of Deism is fair enough. Deists did reject the Bible, the idea of miracles, and the concept of the innate sinfulness of Man. And Dr. Foner is speaking not just for eighteenth century Deists, but also for many of his colleagues in academia, when he describes Judeo-Christian beliefs as “outdated superstitions that should be abandoned.”

In the same textbook Dr. Foner describes Thomas Jefferson as a Deist, although Jefferson never referred to himself that way. In 1816 Jefferson announced that he had written a book “in proof that I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus.”

Other modern day writers have described Benjamin Franklin as a Deist, and in fact Franklin did consider himself a Deist for a few years in his youth; but he rejected Deism several decades before the American Revolution on the grounds that it was not conducive to good interpersonal relationships.²

Only one self-described Deist played a significant role in the Revolution; and the only contribution that Thomas Paine really made was a series of pamphlets that helped build public support for the war effort. He did not sign the Declaration of Independence, and when the Constitution was being ratified in 1787 he was on his way back to Europe. Soon he would turn up among the leaders of the French Revolution, where his “skepticism about religion” was more widely shared.

All fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence, with the possible exceptions of Franklin and Jefferson, described themselves as Christians, and belonged to mainstream Christian denominations. The same is true of all thirty-nine signers of the US Constitution, again with the possible exception of Franklin. (Thomas Jefferson was on a diplomatic mission to France during the Constitutional Convention, and did not participate.)

When George Washington first took the oath of office he expressed the same view, more or less shared by everyone in the room, that God was the foundation of America’s existence as a nation:

It would be peculiarly improper to omit in this first official act my fervent supplications to that Almighty Being who rules over the universe, who presides in the councils of nations, and whose providential aids can supply every human defect, that His benediction may consecrate to the liberties and happiness of the people of the United States a Government instituted by themselves for these essential purposes, and may enable every instrument employed in its administration to execute with success the functions allotted to his charge. In tendering this homage to the Great Author of every public and private good, I assure myself that it expresses your sentiments not less than my own, nor those of my fellow-citizens at large less than either. No people can be bound to acknowledge and adore the Invisible Hand which conducts the affairs of men more than those of the United States.

This belief in Divine Providence as the source of American rights and freedoms was still prevalent when Alexis de Tocqueville toured the US over four decades later.

As I mentioned in a previous post, the philosophical foundations of the United States can be found in the writings of John Locke, the first and most religiously devout of the “Age of Enlightenment” philosophers.

Deism Has Its Day in France

More humanistic Enlightenment Age philosophers like Voltaire and Rousseau had less influence on America’s Founding Fathers than they had on the leaders of the French Revolution, which really did have the sort of anti-religious underpinnings that history professors like to attribute to the American Revolution.

Voltaire considered himself a Deist, and was skeptical about the whole idea of democracy. Having a negative view of the intelligence of the masses, he said that democracy “seems only suitable to a very little country.” Rousseau wrote scathing criticisms of religion, and is frequently described as having been a Deist, although he did not describe himself that way.

Rousseau, in particular, was a political role model for Robespierre and the other French Jacobins; which may explain why they confiscated all the church-owned property in France, and declared Deism the state religion, as soon as they came to power.

And by establishing the first explicitly anti-religious government in world history, the French Revolution set a precedent that would be followed by the leaders of the twentieth century’s Communist states, who would take the concept a step further and make atheism the official religious belief of every Communist nation.

The Jacobin government was precedent setting in other ways too. Between 1789 and 1794 the Jacobins killed their own citizens in large numbers. Estimates of the number of French men, women, and children put under the guillotine during this period vary between ten thousand and forty thousand. Many others died by the sword as the government used brutal tactics to suppress a peasant revolt.

(Godless governments of the twentieth century would follow this example. Under Joseph Stalin’s leadership the Soviet Union would slaughter some twenty or thirty million Soviet citizens; Mao’s government would kill an estimated fifty to seventy million Chinese citizens; and Communist governments in Cambodia, Viet Nam, and elsewhere would kill their citizens in large numbers.)

The Jacobin government of France was overthrown by a new revolutionary government in 1794, then France went through more upheavals and violence,even reverting to monarchy for a while. After much bloodshed over many years France finally end up with democracy and religious freedoms more or less like America’s.

The French people would have been better off if they had based their 1789 revolution on principles more like America’s, and less like those of a typical twenty-first century university faculty.

¹William J. Rorabaugh, Donald T. Critchlow, Paula Baker
.²The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Houghton Mifflin Co. 1923, pp. 89, 90

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” Today most of us take for granted that each human being is born with civil rights, but when Thomas Jefferson put these words in the Declaration of Independence he was expressing a philosophy that was still quite controversial.

Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers largely borrowed the concept of God-given human rights from seventeenth century philosopher John Locke, who got the idea from the Bible; but don’t expect to hear that in a typical university history class. The standard treatment in college history textbooks is that society had to move beyond a childish belief in the Bible before people could have widely recognized human rights.

The freshman textbook America’s Promise frames it this way:

Throughout the 1700s both Americans and Europeans embraced the Enlightenment, a widespread philosophical movement characterized by a devotion to reason, including science; by a desire to promote learning, including mass education; by an insistence on testing ideas concretely and empirically; and by a growing skepticism toward religion. In America Benjamin Franklin, a man both practical and philosophical, epitomized the Enlightenment, as did Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. (Italics added)

As part of the Enlightenment’s emphasis on the dispassionate exploration of ideas, both the British and Americans discussed the nature of a just government. Much of this discussion grew out of a general acceptance of the English philosopher John Locke’s theory that people came together under a compact of their own making to create a government. All government, in this view, was based on natural law, that is, on certain rights that all human beings share.

It’s interesting that John Locke is the only philosopher whose name appears in this passage. There actually were Enlightenment age philosophers who expressed “skepticism about religion,” (Voltaire and Rousseau chief among them); but John Locke acknowledged the Bible as the revealed Word of God.

Locke’s Two Treatises of Government built a strong case for the idea of fundamental human rights. His claim that the right of rulers to govern can only justly come from “the consent of the governed” laid the foundation for the republican form of government Jefferson and the other Founders would build. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and the Declaration of Independence borrows Locke’s phrase “consent of the governed,” along with other key phrases, and is certainly expressing his overall view in declaring that all men are “endowed by their Creator” with inalienable rights to life and liberty.

In the first of his Two Treatises, Locke adduces Bible verses by the dozen to refute Sir Robert Filmer’s claims of a Divine Right of kings. In the seminal Second Treatise he tells us that the arbitrary power of kings is not legitimate, because all men are answerable to God.

For Men being all the Workmanship of one Omnipotent, and infinitely wise Maker; All the Servants of one Sovereign Master, sent into the world by his order and about his business, they are his Property, whose Workmanship they are, made to last during His, not one another’s Pleasure. And being furnished with like Faculties, sharing all in one Community of Nature, there cannot be supposed any such Subordination among us, that may Authorize us to destroy one another, as if we were made for one another’s uses, as the inferior ranks of Creatures are for ours.

America’s Founding Fathers may well have been attracted to Locke’s philosophies specifically because of his belief in Biblical Truth; it was a belief most of them shared.

John Adams, in his inaugural address, told the nation that he considered “a decent respect for Christianity” to be “among the best recommendations for the public service.” He then closed out the address with “And may that Being who is supreme over all, the Patron of Order, the Fountain of Justice, and the Protector in all ages of the world of virtuous liberty, continue His blessing upon this nation and its Government and give it all possible success and duration consistent with the ends of His providence.”

The authors of the history textbook quoted above are right when they describe Benjamin Franklin as “a man both practical and philosophical.” And it was these very characteristics that made Franklin, who was less devout in religion than most of the other Founders, nonetheless an advocate of conventional religious practices. In his interesting and very readable autobiographyhe attributes his own success in life to a verse from the Old Testament book of Proverbs. Also in the autobiography he describes how he had, in his youth, briefly rejected his Christian upbringing in favor of Deism, an amorphous semi-Religion that denies the validity of the Bible, the power of prayer, and any role for God in the lives of men. Franklin soon observed that all the Deists he knew, himself included, tended to treat their friends and families badly. He concluded that Deism, “tho’ it might be true, was not very useful.”

George Washington, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and virtually all the other men who played large roles in forming our nation and writing its Constitution named God as the author and source of all human rights, and the only hope for the Nation’s success.

Teachers who imply that “skepticism toward religion” is necessary for the development of a free and just society are misrepresenting history.

In his speech President Obama said “when the first Muslim American was recently elected to Congress, he took the oath to defend our Constitution using the same Holy Qur’an that one of our founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson, kept in his personal library.”  (The congressman the President is referring to is Representative Keith Ellison of Minnesota, who first took the oath of office in January of 2007.)

The Koran (aka Quran, aka Qur’an) is the central document of Islam, written by the Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century.  It consists of 114 “Suras,” or chapters.  Muslims believe that the Koran is the literal word of God, dictated to Muhammad by the Angel Gabriel.

President Obama makes it sound as if the author of the Declaration of Independence kept a Koran in his library so he could learn about tolerance and peace.  In actual fact, Thomas Jefferson had no such illusions about the contents of the “holy” Koran.

Jefferson’s introduction to Koranic theology came in 1786, when he and John Adams participated in negotiations with Tripoli’s ambassador to London, Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja.

Pirates from North Africa’s Islamic states had been attacking merchant ships, and even small towns, all across the Mediterranean.  Any “infidel,” or non-Muslim, unfortunate enough to be caught in one of these raids would be carried off to a life of slavery.  Female captives were especially prized.

In their report to the American Congress, Adams and Jefferson wrote that when they asked the Ambassador how he justified these attacks he cited the Koran.  “The Ambassador answered us,” they wrote, “that it was founded on the Laws of the Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners.”

There is a brief description of this meeting on Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Barbary_War

Ambassador Rahman Adja was representing the Koran much more accurately than President Obama did in his recent speech.  Sura 2 of The Korandeclares “God is an enemy to the infidels.”  The first page of Sura 47 admonishes “When ye encounter the infidels, strike off their heads until ye have made a great slaughter among them, and of the rest make fast the fetters.”

Sura 8 declares “Believers! Wage war against such of the infidels as are your neighbors, and let them find you rigorous; and know that God is with those who fear him.”

Sura 8 further tells Muslims “No prophet hath been able to take captives until he had made a great slaughter in the earth…Eat therefore of the spoils you have taken what is lawful and good.”

Sura 8 also makes it clear that Muslims are to be in a state of war with the rest of the world until they succeed in forcing all the nations to accept Islam:  “Fight then against them till strife be at an end, and the religion be all of it God’s.”

In Sura 3 the Prophet warns of dire consequences for any Muslim who makes friends with an infidel: “Let not believers take infidels for their friends rather than believers; whoso shall do this hath nothing to hope from God.”  Suras 4 and 5 repeat this warning.

The Koran is chock full of endorsements of slavery, giving Ambassador Rahman Adja plenty of grounds for justifying what the Barbary pirates were doing.  Sura 16, for example, tells us “God maketh comparison between a slave, the property of his lord, who  hath no power over anything, and a free man whom we have ourselves supplied with goodly supplies, and who giveth alms therefrom both in secret and openly.  Shall they be held equal?  No: praise be to God!”

One reason the Middle Eastern pirates of the late eighteenth century were so eager to take female prisoners is that the Koran explicitly gives Islamic men the right to have sex with their female slaves.  Sura 4 tells the Muslim man “Forbidden to you also are married women, except those who are in your hands as slaves.”

Sura 23 offers blessings for those men “who restrain their appetites (save with their wives, or the slaves whom their right hands possess; for in that case they shall be free from blame.  But they whose desires reach further than this are transgressors).”                              

In Sura 33 Muhammad declares his own rights: “O Prophet!  We allow thee thy wives whom thou hast dowered, and the slaves whom thy right hand possesseth out of the booty which God hath granted thee.”

Sura 70 again urges Muslims to practice sexual restraint “save with their wives or the slaves whom their right hands have won, for there they shall be blameless.”

History does not tell us exactly when Jefferson picked up that copy of the Koran that Keith Ellison would later hold while being sworn in as a United States Congressman, but the shock he expressed at the words of Ambassador Rahman Adja would  seem to imply Jefferson had not yet read the book when he had that 1786 meeting.

Jefferson was a studious man, and it’s probably safe to assume that he had read that Koran he bought by the time he became President of the United States fifteen years later, in 1801. If he had, the knowledge of its contents must have stood him in good stead when the first crisis of his young presidency erupted. Just two months after Jefferson’s inauguration the Pasha of Tripoli, angry over America’s reluctance to pay protection money, declared war on the United States.  Jefferson sent the US Navy and, eventually, the Marines.  In letters to his friends the new President raged about the villainy of the pirates and their state sponsors.

If Thomas Jefferson had known that a politician would one day be sworn in as a member of the United States Congress holding a Koran, he would have been shocked and frightened.