John Adams on the Puritan contribution to liberty

John Adams wasn't just a politician, but also had a long career as a political theorist and commentator, a career that pre-dated the American Revolution by over two decades. And in his work as a theorist and commentator, Adams addressed the Puritan contribution to human liberty. Interestingly enough, Adams's religious views do do not fit within the mould of orthodox Christianity. That being the case, it is noteworthy that in his early work Adams had a very high regard for those most orthodox of Calvinists, the Puritan fathers of New England.

In A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, written in 1765 (circa the time of the French and Indian War), Adams wrote as a subject of the British crown and a patriot of the Empire. He begins his discussion of the Puritans in that text by noting that the Puritans were seen as "enthusiastical, superstitious, and republican" by many of the proper people of Adams's day. Adams strongly attacks such views of the Puritans, stating that they were "grossly injurious and false." The Puritans, Adams contends, were no more enthusiasts than the other sects within the Christian religion, and that their religious fervor, while a "noble infirmity," was also a source of strength for the group: "far from being a reproach to them," Adams wrote, their devotion "was greatly to their honor."

Adams then goes on to describe how the Puritans sought to fuse reason and religion, a commitment to biblical faith with the prudential considerations of practical men. "Human and benevolent principles," Adams wrote, were the basis of Puritan policy. While modern readers and scholars might object to Adams's characterization of motivations of the Puritans, Adams saw in the Puritans a resolute commitment to fight "Tyranny in every form, and shape, and appearance." The Puritans were willing to face punishment and even death rather than to compromise their beliefs. Their convictions serve, Adams' contends, as an example of "steady, manly, pertinacious spirit."

As noted above, at the time he wrote A Dissertation, Adams was still a loyal monarchist and he went out of his way to note that the Puritans, despite their resistance to certaion policies of the British kings, were not foes of the monarchy. They rather sought a balanced government, with proper checks on the authority of both the king and the church. "[T]hey saw clearly, that popular powers must be placed as a guard a control, a balance, to the powers of the monarch and the priest, in every government, or else it would soon become the man of sin, the whore of Babylon, the mystery of iniquity, a great and detestable system of fraud, violence, and usurpation." The Puritan commitment was to limited government, not to any one particular form of it. And the reason for their commitment to limited government was grounded in their ultimately religious view that human nature is such to render a limitless government a mechanism of tyranny.

The Puritans had a strong commitment to secular reform and a stronger commitment to religious renewal, so much so that Adams characterizes ecclesiastical reform as "[t]heir greatest concern." In the Puritan view, secular and religious reform were not separate and distinct, but built off each other. Thus, the Puritans sought, according to Adams, to live in a state that upheld "the dignity of human nature." This two-fold commitment lead the Puritans to seek thoroughgoing reform of both secular and ecclesiastical institutions, removing "feudal inequalities an dependencies as could be spared." And undergirding all this, as Adams notes, was the Puritan hostility to the Catholic religion, with its rituals and its ecclesiastical doctrines. The idea of a priest, Adams writes, was one which "no mortal could deserve, and as always must, from the constitution of human nature, be dangerous in society."

Thus, the Puritans sought to purge the Protestant church of the vestiges of Catholicism, to preserve the spiritual and secular liberty that they saw due to every man. Instead of a priesthood, Adams contents that the Puritans "established sacerdotal ordination on the foundation of the Bible and common sense." In doing so, the Puritans stressed, in Adams's account, the characteristics of "industry, virtue, piety, and learning." This had the effect of creating a people who were far more "independent on the civil powers" than those who lived in "a scale of subordination, from a pope down to priests and friars and confessors -- necessarily and essentially a sordid, stupid, and wretched herd." That the church of England continued, in modified form, to uphold the same system of subordination earned it the same disdain from the Puritans and from Adams.

With Adams's early presentation of the Puritans, one sees what might be called "the Puritan myth" in full flower. While much of his analysis may be disputed in light of modern scholarship, Adams's overview encapsulates what was the dominant view of the Puritans at the time leading up to the American Revolution. And there is little doubt that the Puritan refusal to compromise principle when faced with the demands of unlimited government did much to inspire most of the American patriots in the time prior to, during and immediately after our break with the British Empire.

[Cross posted at American Creation.]

Alexander Hamilton on natural calamities and the will of God

As I've been communicating with family members back in North Dakota this week, I have heard of the tremendous suffering faced by the people in the Minot area, suffering caused by massive floods there.  In the face of such natural disasters, one question that is often raised involves God's presence or absence during such events.  While not one to try to resolve the recurring problem of theodicy here on this blog, I thought it would be interesting to note that Alexander Hamilton, while still a young man living in Jamaica, addressed the topic of God and natural disasters in his 1772 Letter on an August Hurricane.  A reconstruction of Hamilton's letter is available at the link.

In his letter, Hamilton ponders the transitory nature of human life, of the power of natural disasters to demonstrate how powerless and weak human beings are.  In the face of the power of the storm, the foolishness of human declarations of self-sufficiency is revealed.  From from standing on his own, man is in need of God's aid to deal with the fragility of his situation.  "[L]earn to know thyself," Hamilton urges, "[l]earn to know thy best support."  Instead of elevating oneself, the proper path is to embrace humility and "adore thy God."  As a consequence, human beings would enjoy the "sweet...voice of an approving conscience," and would have no fear in the face of natural disasters.  "Let the Earth rend.  Let the planets forsake their course. Let the Sun be extinguished and the Heavens burst asunder.  Yet what have I to dread"  My staff can never be broken -- in Omnip[o]tence I trusted."

The fury of the storm, so great and terrible, brought to Hamilton's mind his mortality, and reminded him of the "baseness and folly" of living a life apart from God.  God uses the forces of nature, Hamilton states, to bring people back to understanding their dependence on Him:  "That which, in a calm unruffled temper, we call a natural cause, seemed then like the correction of the Deity."  Aware of his sinfulness and despairing of God's mercy, Hamilton writes that that calming of the hurricane was to him an act of God's deliverance, for which each person should rejoice and be humble "in the presence of thy deliverer."

Hamilton cautions against viewing a positive outcome from the storm as an opportunity for self-glorification or selfish happiness.  Instead, he urges compassion for those who suffered from the storm, to feel empathy for them and to realize the physical and spiritual damage caused by the disaster that had befallen.  In the face of injury, sickness, poverty and death caused by the storm, Hamilton urges the wealthy to step forward to ease the burdens suffered by their fellow human beings.  "O ye, who revel in affluence," Hamilton writes, "see the afflictions of humanity and bestow your superfluity to ease them.  Say not, we have suffered also, and thence withhold your compassion, What are you[r] sufferings compared to those?   Ye still have more than enough left."  The proper response of those spared is not selfishness but service, not selfishness but self-giving.  As Hamilton puts it, "Act wisely.  Succor the miserable and lay up treasure in Heaven."

For Hamilton, the Hurricane of August 1772 called people to humble themselves before God and to realize their need for His support and mercy.  For those who made it through the storm relatively unscathed, the proper response to their good fortune was not self-satisfaction, but self-giving, to reach out to help those who were suffering from the effects of the storm.  Hamilton provides no great metaphysical answer to the problem of suffering in the world, but instead offers practical advice for dealing with such suffering -- to see in it the opportunity to turn back towards God and to each other.  In a world where we can only, to borrow a phrase from St. John, "see through a glass darkly," Hamilton's advice is worth listening to.

On a side note, Hamilton's letter was so well-received that it served as an impetus for a group of benefactors to send him to America to get a formal education.  From that point on, Hamilton was involved in the struggle for American Independence, then for adequate constitutional reform to allow the infant Republic to thrive, and then for Union and sound fiscal management.  Without his letter bringing him to the attention of his benefactors, Hamilton could have been left on the island of Jamaica and our nation deprived of his invaluable service. The hand of Providence, perhaps?

The law comes from natural rights, natural rights do not come from the law

"Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place."

- Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850), The Law (1850).

"I could not reason myself into believing that men are only machines"

What saved me from moral and emotional paralysis in this pseudo-philosophy was, I think, a deep-seated interest in humanity. I could not reason myself into believing that men are only machines; I could not smother in logic the sense of mystery that broods upon the world, not find any place in the network of blind chance and fate for the human will. What is the nature of this thing we call life, this irrational power which by its own initiative expands into endless activities, and finally creates for itself a conscious soul of suffering and joy?

- Paul Elmer More (1864-1937), Pages from an Oxford Diary.  (Hat tip to Imaginative Conservative.)

John Jay, John Locke and their common objection to toleration for Catholics

I've been reading through by David Sehat (Oxford Univ. Press, 2011) (full review to follow after I've finished the book and thought on it for a bit). One of the interesting points raised thus far in the book is the troubled history of religious liberty for Roman Catholics in the colonial and revolutionary periods in our nation's history. It is well-established that notable Founding Fathers like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams had little respect for the Roman Catholic Church, seeing the Church as both as a staunch defender of orthodox trinitarianism and as a barrier to a rationalized and largely de-supernaturalized re-imaging of the Christian faith. And it bears noting that those two Founders were right on both counts.

Sehat discusses some of the deeper roots of anti-Catholicism in early America, and he pays particular attention to the prime secular justification for anti-Catholic prejudice at the time, namely that Catholics, due to their spiritual allegiance to the Pope, could not be trusted to be faithful citizens. This concern was so strong, Sehat notes, that it lead to specific language being included in New York's 1777 constitution limiting religious freedom so as not to "justify practices inconsistent with the peace or safety of this State." This wording reflected the concerns of John Jay, to limit the religious freedom enjoyed by Roman Catholics. As quoted at length by Sehat, Jay spoke out in defense of religious freedom, but did not believe that basic civil liberties should be extended to Roman Catholics. As Jay put it, liberty should be granted to everyone,

Except the professors of the religion of the church of Rome, who ought not to hold lands in, or be admitted to a participation of the civil rights enjoyed by the members of this State, until such a time as the said professors shall appear in the supreme court of this State, and there most solemnly swear, that they verily believe in their consciences, that no pope, priest or foreign authority on earth, hath power to absolve the subjects of this State from their allegiance to the same. And further, that they renounce and believe to be false and wicked, the dangerous and damnable doctrine, that the pope, or any other earthly authority, have power to absolve men from sins, described in, and prohibited by the Holy Gospel of Jesus Christ; and particularly, that no pope, priest or foreign authority on earth, hath power to absolve them from the obligation of this oath.

Any Catholic who had so sworn such an oath, of course, would by its terms have to affirm doctrines contrary to those of the Roman Catholic Church. Specifically, a Catholic who complied with Jay's proposal would have to deny one of the sacraments of the Church (confession), and would have to deny the power of the Pope to release people from vows and oaths. No Catholic, then or now, could in good conscience swear to such requirements.

As Sehat notes, "Jay's problem with Roman Catholicism was similar to the views held by many Protestants."   Jay viewed Catholicism as conflating spiritual and secular authority, providing too much institutional power to the Roman Catholic Church to intervene in civil affairs.  Fortunately for Catholics in New York and for liberty in that state, Jay's efforts to restrict the rights of Catholics  only garnered the assent of a little more than a third of the members of the New York constitutional convention.   Jay did, however manage to include language in the New York constitution that, to again quote Sehat, "suffused New York's guarantee of religious liberty with Protestant sectarianism, in spirt of its apparent separation of church and state."

There was much history within the English political and religious landscape that fueled Jay's attempt to restrict the religious and civic liberty of Catholics in New York.  Jay's concerns about papal authority to release people from oaths stretched  back to the "Bloody Question" that was posed to Catholic martyrs slaughtered for their faith under Queen Elizabeth I.  And even that ardent defender of religious liberty, John Locke, drew the line at toleration for Roman Catholics, as the original text of his Letter Concerning Toleration indicates.  And Locke's objection was in substance the same as Jay's -- a concern that Catholics would not be faithful to their nation in light of their obedience to the Pope.

This objection has largely disappeared from American civic life, thanks in large part to the patriotism and service that Roman Catholics have demonstrated for this country.  In addition, Catholics have run for high office throughout the country, and served with distinction in public life.  Yet while most anti-Catholicism has retreated into the shadows, it is important to note the widespread and deep anti-Catholicism that was present among much of the populace during the Founding period, and to recall how often religious liberty was sacrificed on the altar of prejudice. 

[Cross posted over at American Creation.]

The background behind the Jefferson Bible

One of the most famous of Thomas Jefferson's religious works is his harmony of the New Testament Gospels.  Jefferson edited the Gospels, after consulting versions in Greek, Latin, English and French, with the purpose of distilling what Jefferson thought to be the authentic teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.  Jefferson edited out the miracles and most of the supernatural events in the Gospels, while emphasizing the moral & ethical teachings found in the texts.

The genesis and purpose of Jefferson's composition of his Gospel harmony is set out pretty clearly in an 1804 letter that Jefferson wrote to noted unitarian thinker Joseph Priestly.  In the letter, Jefferson provides some advice to Priestly regarding Priestly's own plan to write out a study of the moral teachings of Jesus.  In giving his advice, Jefferson reveals the early stages of his own investigation in that topic:

I think you cannot avoid giving, as preliminary to the comparison, a digest of his moral doctrines, extracted in his own words fro the Evangelists, and leaving out everything relative to his personal history and character.  It would be shore and precious.  With a view to do this for my own satisfaction, I had sent to Philadelphia to get tow testaments (Greek) of the same edition, and two English, with a design to cut out the morsels of morality and paste them on the leaves of a book, in the manner you describe as having been pursued in forming your Harmony.  But I shall now get the thing done by better hands. 

Letter to Joseph Priestly, January 29, 1804, reprinted in In God We Trust:  The Religious Beliefs and Ideas of the American Founding Fathers, ed. by Norman Cousins (Harper & Brothers:  1958), pg. 171.

The letter from Jefferson to Priestly provides key insight about the context surrounding the Jefferson Bible.  First, Jefferson was not engaging in a unique activity.  He wasn't the only one engaging in the production of the Gospel harmony designed to spread a vision of Christianity that was grounded on the moral teachings of Jesus, rather than in the New Testament's teachings about Jesus.   Jefferson notes at the end of the passage quoted above some relief at the idea that Priestly is working on a harmony because of Priestly's greater skills at producing such a study.

Second, Jefferson's advice indicates the key to this method:  focusing on the words of Jesus rather than the explanation of those words provided by the Evangelists and the other writings in the New Testament.  Jefferson's approach fused an antiquarian approach to the Gospels -- trying to get back to the earliest strata of the teachings of Jesus -- with a belief that the Gospel accounts as we have them were an accurate source of those words.  Hence, Jefferson sought not only to take the words of Jesus from the New Testament as translated into English, but he sought to take the words from the Greek New Testament as well.  It turns out that Jefferson was incorrect about the words of Jesus in the Gospels being the earliest strata of information we have about Jesus -- the epistles of St. Paul were actually written earlier than any of the Gospels as we currently have them -- but that's an error of application, not of method.

Third, at the time of the letter to Priestly, Jefferson sought to undertake his harmony for his "own satisfaction."  Jefferson didn't seek to publish his study at this point, but was thinking of compiling his study for his own use.  The nature of how he sought to carry out the composition of the harmony -- cutting out the relevant texts from his copies of the New Testament and pasting them into the "leaves of a book," indicates that he wasn't thinking of sending the text to a publisher.  It was to be a private book indicating his own private thoughts, something quite understandable given the fact that Jefferson was a sitting president, an active politician, and one who was constantly dogged by allegations of infidelity regarding religion.  For good reason he might seek not to widely publicize his views regarding the nature of Jesus of Nazareth.

[Cross posted at American Creation.]

The duty of preachers to address political issues

It is the duty of the clergy to accommodate their discourses to the times, to preach against such sins are most prevalent, and recommend such virtues as are most wanted. For example, -- if exorbitant ambition and venality are predominant, ought they not to warn their hears against those vices? If public spirit is much wanted, should they not inculcate this great virtue? If the rights and duties of Christian magistrates and subjects are disputed,should they not explain them, show their nature, ends, limitations, and restrictions, how much soever it may move the gall of Massachusettensis?

- John Adams, Novanglus (1774) reprinted in In God We Trust: The Religious Beliefs and Ideas of the American Founding Fathers, ed. by Norman Cousins (Harper & Brothers: 1958), pg. 90.

[Cross posted over at American Creation.]

If he was alive today, a statement like that would get John Adams labeled a member of the "Religious Right." Which would be pretty ironic, given Adams's overall religious views.

Ronald Reagan on the right to life

Abraham Lincoln recognized that we could not survive as a free land when some men could decide that others were not fit to be free and should therefore be slaves. Likewise, we cannot survive as a free nation when some men decide that others are not fit to live and should be abandoned to abortion or infanticide. My Administration is dedicated to the preservation of America as a free land, and there is no cause more important for preserving that freedom than affirming the transcendent right to life of all human beings, the right without which no other rights have any meaning.

- President Ronald Reagan (1911-2004), Abortion and the Conscience of a Nation (1983).

Russell Kirk on Alexander Hamilton's economic views

Among many theorists in the libertarian movement, Alexander Hamilton is looked upon with disdain as the father of crony capitalism.  A more sophisticated and truer view of Hamilton's economic views is set forth by the intellectual father of modern conservatism:

It ought not to be thought that Hamilton either intended or desired the industrializing of the United States on the scale which was achieved after the Civil War and has been much intensified since then.  He argued that much manufacturing could be done in farm households, or by farmers working part of the time in small factories of neighboring towns -- the early pattern of the New England shoe industry.  He did not anticipate the growth of industrial cities with a population of millions, believing mechanized industry a liberation from monotonous drudgery.  he began writing on economic subjects when the Industrial Revolution was but thirty years old, and neither he nor any other public man wholly foresaw the consequences, demographic and social, of increasing mechanization, specialization, and division of labor -- though Smith had misgivings, and Burke would soon express some.

- Russell Kirk, Rights and Duties:  Reflections on Our Conservative Constitution (Spence:  1997), pg. 86.

Hamilton's vision was of small businessmen and farmers working in manufacturing in order to guarantee our nation's self-sufficiency.  That's a worthy vision, particularly suited to the 21st century economy.  Given the current hostility to Hamilton amidst some on the Right in our current political climate, the sage words of Kirk are like water in the desert.

The bonds of unity in the early American Republic

"For this you have every inducement of sympathy and interest. Citizens, by birth or choice, of a common country, that country has a right to concentrate your affections. The name of American, which belongs to you in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of patriotism more than any appellation derived from local discriminations. With slight shades of difference, you have the same religion, manners, habits, and political principles. You have in a common cause fought and triumphed together; the independence and liberty you possess are the work of joint counsels, and joint efforts of common dangers, sufferings, and successes."

- President George Washington (1732-1799), Farewell Address (1796).

Dissenting religion and the push for American independence

From the great English statesman Edmund Burke (1729-1797) comes this analysis of the role that dissenting religion played in the American commitment to liberty at the time leading up to our Revolution:

Religion, always a principle of energy, in this new people is no way worn out or impaired; and their mode of professing it is also one main cause of this free spirit. The people are Protestants; and of that kind which is the most adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion. This is a persuasion not only favourable to liberty, but built upon it. I do not think, Sir, that the reason of this averseness in the dissenting churches, from all that looks like absolute government, is so much to be sought in their religious tenets, as in their history. Every one knows that the Roman Catholic religion is at least coeval with most of the governments where it prevails; that it has generally gone hand in hand with them, and received great favour and every kind of support from authority. The Church of England too was formed from her cradle under the nursing care of regular government. But the dissenting interests have sprung up in direct opposition to all the ordinary powers of the world; and could justify that opposition only on a strong claim to natural liberty. Their very existence depended on the powerful and unremitted assertion of that claim. All Protestantism, even the most cold and passive, is a sort of dissent. But the religion most prevalent in our northern colonies is a refinement on the principle of resistance; it is the dissidence of dissent, and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion. This religion, under a variety of denominations agreeing in nothing but in the communion of the spirit of liberty, is predominant in most of the northern provinces; where the Church of England, notwithstanding its legal rights, is in reality no more than a sort of private sect, not composing most probably the tenth of the people. The colonists left England when this spirit was high, and in the emigrants was the highest of all; and even that stream of foreigners, which has been constantly flowing into these colonies, has, for the greatest part, been composed of dissenters from the establishments of their several countries, and have brought with them a temper and character far from alien to that of the people with whom they mixed.

- Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies, March 22, 1775.

[Cross-posted at Culby's Daily Quotebook and American Creation].

American independence means religious liberty

"When I signed the Declaration of Independence I had in view not only our independence from England but the toleration of all sects."

- Charles Carroll, letter to G.W. Parke Custis, February 20, 1829, quoted in The Essential Wisdom of the Founding Fathers, edited by Carol Kelly-Gangi (Fall River Press:  2009), pg. 31.

Carroll (1737-1832), a member of the planter aristocracy of Maryland, was the only Roman Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence.

Enduring freedom is embodied freedom

"The only freedom which can last is a freedom embodied somewhere, rooted in a history, located in space, sanctioned by a genealogy, and blessed by a religious establishment.  The only equality which abstract rights, insisted upon outside the context of politics, are likely to provide is the equality of universal slavery. It is a lesson which Western man is only now beginning to learn. And at great cost."

- M.E. Bradford, A Better Guide Than Reason:  Federalists & Anti-Federalists (Transaction Publishers:  1994), pg. xviii.