The Role of Theology and Philosophy in American Independence

“The past is a foreign country,” says a character in L.P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between. Our own past can seem like a foreign country almost 250 years after Americans declared independence. And when our founding is debated — a perpetual activity both popular and academic — these seemingly foreign characteristics come into sharp relief. 

Perhaps no characteristic of the past is more foreign to us than the relationship between philosophy and theology. What the Founding generation joined together, we now try to put asunder. Compartmentalizing philosophy and theology, reason and revelation, even to put them at odds with one another in public life, is a grievous misunderstanding of the Founding that must be discarded lest it contribute to an already growing problem of making us foreigners in our own country. 

Mythical Foundings and Founders

Foundings are determinative of a nation’s character and destiny; what Americans believed in the 1770s isn’t a merely historical question any more than one’s DNA is a merely historical question. Because our Founders were Britons first, they knew of Saxon chiefs Hengist and Horsa from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae and Thomas Jefferson proposed including them on the new nation’s Great Seal. The Founders also knew Virgil’s founding epic Aeneid, though their iconography for the new nation drew more from other works by him. More important to the Founders, however, than the wanderings of Aeneas were the wanderings of the Israelites. The Hebrew slave exodus from Egypt inspired even the most skeptical and heterodox. For the Great Seal, Benjamin Franklin proposed Moses gaining victory over Pharoah at the Red Sea. Thomas Jefferson proposed the Israelites being led by God to their new nation. Even for these men whose beliefs were heterodox in significant ways, these were powerful images for politics and public morality. 

The Exodus inspired the progress of Anglo-American liberty, before and after the Founding, but such progress was possible only because Britons developed a potent political theology. There were certainly philosophical ideas about liberty for them to draw from, but biblical and theological conceptions offered ideas that became imperatives. In several of his essays on the Founding, Ellis Sandoz liked to repeat Perry Miller’s statement that “Rationalism may declare independence but would inspire no one to fight for it.” How else does one explain that while the African slave trade and West Indian plantation flourished in the Age of Enlightenment, it was abolished only by those who saw themselves as holy warriors? 

The ancient foundings that inspired our Founders were eventually replaced in popular memory by the American Founding. It too has achieved a mythical quality — mythical in the sense of privileging imaginative power over historicity. “Print the legend,” Dutton Peabody said to Ransom Stoddard in John Ford’s great film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance; and popular legends about our founders went on to even supplant their biblical, Roman, or Saxon heroes: Ben Franklin flying kites or vigilant Paul Revere single-handedly saving Lexington and Concord. But while these popular legends were salutary myths about character or heroism, the myths academics have built about the founding generation are anything but salutary. In these just-so stories, the men who declared independence were ideological revolutionaries who compartmentalized or privileged philosophy over theology. This is a myth only in the more pedestrian sense that it is untrue: it reflects a contemporary bias wherein philosophy is progressive, universal, and liberal while theology is presumed to be parochial, revanchist and illiberal. But if that is true, what are we to make of English skeptic Thomas Paine using scripture to advance liberty in Common Sense (1776) or patriot ministers deploying philosophy to advance liberty in sermons? The truth is far more interesting than the compartmentalizing thesis would have us believe.

The Protestant Background

Appreciating the role of philosophy and theology in colonial America requires acknowledging two simple facts: one contested; the other not. The uncontested fact is that the colonies were Protestant, which is not a precise claim about church membership (which historians debate), devotional piety, doctrinal unity, or the significance of Roman Catholics. It simply means that Americans inherited and perpetuated a particular patrimony honoring wisdom both sacred and profane, and directed both sources to one political end. 

This Protestant patrimony extended back through Britain and eventually to the Protestant reformers themselves. The magisterial reformers’ appreciation for ideas both sacred and profane is incontestable, however much niche Protestant theologies quarreled about it for over a century. The most recent and careful scholarship, whether online or in monographs, demonstrates the Protestant debt to, and reliance on, philosophy including Thomas Aquinas, the natural law tradition more generally, and its conservative approach to preexisting legal, moral, and political philosophy. For example, Calvin cut his academic teeth on Seneca and used Roman and Natural Law in his interpretation of the Mosaic Law. Protestants wrote extensively on Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics and by the late sixteenth century are citing Aquinas favorably. Protestant political theology relying on preexisting political and legal philosophy became quite robust, particularly under persecution. Sixteenth century Protestants in both England and France produced significant political works. John Adams said that Bishop John Ponet in 1556 articulated the same principles as Algernon Sydney and John Locke. Adams also cited the Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos as a source of Anglo-American constitutionalism. Political controversies in the seventeenth century produced rich political works integrating theology and philosophy, including John Milton’s Areopagitica (1644) and Samuel Rutherford’s Lex, Rex (1644) (which drew from over 700 authors both pagan and Christian), and Johannes Althusius’s Politica (1614) a brilliant articulation of federalism and subsidiarity bridging medieval and modern political theory. 

Althusius’s Politica contains an essential chapter that should dispel the myth of an unbridgeable gulf fixed between the hell of an intolerant theological politics and the heaven of a tolerant philosophical one. Althusius argues correctly from precedent that “The Christian religion not only subordinates the bodies and goods of pious subjects to the magistrate, but even lays their souls and consciences under obligation to him, and shapes them to obedience.” Of course, the new American federal government and many of the states abandoned the traditional vehicle for this obedience: religious establishment or a robust confessional state. Some establishments did persist, however, and so did religious tests for office, blasphemy laws, and sabbath laws. However, lest one think that Althusius was presuming to force belief, he says that faith is a gift of God, not of Caesar. This is because, Althusius writes, “God alone has imperium” over what he calls “the secrets and intimate recesses of the heart” where the Kingdom of God resides. One sees a similar distinction justifying New England establishments not only in Chapter 17 of the 1649 Platform of Church Discipline but also in Justice Story’s commentary on the Bill of Rights in 1833. 

Protestant magistrates could therefore only presume to guard against outward impiety. The operational question is when this is prudent. When demands for public piety undermine civil order, the magistrate is to cut his losses and preserve civil peace. Althusius writes, “Those who err in religion are therefore to be ruled not by external force or by corporal arms,” because “God is able to lead them to himself.” He goes on to argue that “If they cannot be persuaded by the Word of God, how much less can they be coerced by the threats or punishments of the magistrate. . . . Whoever therefore wishes to have a peaceful realm should abstain from persecutions.” In the Protestant patrimony, the magistrate’s religious policy was therefore to be whatever enabled good political life under the current circumstances. As Baptists and Quakers proliferated in Britain and America and proved to be loyal and civil, it made more sense to treat them as good Britons than as bad Christians. 

John Cartwright and Jonathan Shipley’s Defense of America

Space does not permit a full history of how Britain and America moved from robust establishment to what we would now (imprecisely) consider a more “liberal” politics, but substantial changes were not owed to philosophy contra theology. Instead, toleration and liberty were owed to a common treasury of political wisdom and expedient measures articulated by the faithful during crucibles in which sectarianism produced intolerable civil discord. It is a blinkered view to have the relationship between philosophy and theology turn on religious toleration or liberty, however. Instead, in the British and American case, theology shored up existing legal and political philosophy as Britons moved from a more narrowly Protestant confessional state to a pan-Protestant constitutional order. Consistent with what Althusius and others prescribed, doctrinal unity gave way to political concord necessitated by domestic and international challenges.

The shift from confessional to constitutional Protestantism is especially evident after 1689. Republican and whig ideals at the end of the Stuarts and under the Hanoverians promoted virtue, loyalty, and adherence to the rule of law. Religion of a particularly expedient political or civil character was touted everywhere. This new Protestantism encompassed traditional theological figures like Cotton Mather and George Whitefield and philosophical figures such as Samuel von Pufendorf, Pierre Bayle, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Secularization may have occurred among a small circle of elites, but what occurred more widely was the popular articulation of a politically appropriate piety. As Britons competed against rival powers on the world stage and Jacobite and Tory upheavals at home, republicans promoted sociability, civility, humility, charity, benevolence, education, community, patriotism, and moderation. Protestant faith (rightly understood) was cast as a reasonable one involving persuasion and moral freedom, and eschewing any Protestant, Roman Catholic, Islamic, African, or Asian faith seen as seditious, disorderly, superstitious, idolatrous, inhumane, ecstatic, violent, or authoritarian. “Popery” became a term of political derision applied to Protestants and Catholics alike. Thomas Gordon and John Trenchard’s popular essays articulated this new ethos on both sides of the Atlantic. 

John Cartwright’s American Independence the Interest and Glory of Great Britain reflects this same Protestant, republican, whig sensibility from the very beginning with its opening quote from Trenchard and Gordon. Cartwright’s patriotism praises England, “her religion and her laws.” He extols impartiality and honesty, equity, humility, and judging all things by reason and religion. He condemns passion, prejudice, pride, ambition, self-interest, moral corruption, and immodest empire. He extols the rights and usefulness of trade, another popular Protestant trope of the time. 

Cartwright isn’t simply a moral philosopher, however; he’s also a theologian, using scriptural metaphors to cast the political situation, making the political virtues Christian virtues, describing the laws of nature as the laws of God, and equating “the most well-known principles of the English constitution,” “maxims of the law of nature,” and “clearest doctrines of Christianity” as all simple and plain. It is the “political Popes,” he says, who would distrust such common sense and assert infallibility over both freedom and “true religion.” It is God who empowers rulers, bestows rights, and reveals the “Gospel of civil as well as religious salvation unto babes.” It was not the Magna Charta that gave Englishmen their rights any more than councils or popes can overwrite “Gospel purity;” rather, rights were ingrafted into them at Creation and are as straightforward as the unadorned Word.

Bishop John Shipley echoes many of Cartwright’s arguments, likewise reflecting his political Protestantism, albeit not as ambitiously. He appeals to reason and moderation. He condemns the vanity of unlimited sovereignty reserved for God alone, and considers the providential judgment that might await a prideful Britain. Shipley calls the Americans co-heirs of liberty, heirs of Britain’s better days, its old arts and manners, and its expiring national virtues. He sees this inheritance as the blessing of Providence, hopefully making America immune to the vices now gripping British politics. Shipley closes with a warning that Britain must either honor its divine calling to preserve liberty, a call with both philosophical and theological roots for eighteenth century Britons, or face divine judgment: “We seem not to be sensible of the high and important trust which providence has committed to our charge. The most precious remains of civil liberty, that the world can now boast of, are lodged in our hands; and God forbid that we should violate so sacred a deposit. By enslaving your colonies, you not only ruin the peace, commerce, and the fortunes of both countries; but you extinguish the fairest hopes, shut up the last asylum of mankind. I think, my Lords without being weakly superstitions, that a good man may hope that heaven will take part against the execution of a plan which seems big, not only with mischief, but impiety.”

The arguments and language of Cartwright and Shipley demonstrate that they defended Americans in the hope that we would join piety and reason, religion and philosophy as partners in liberty. Such a partnership, built on the Protestant patrimony, enables a humane politics that neither can hope to articulate or motivate as well on its own. Joining philosophy and theology is in America’s DNA – whether the legacy of Jefferson and Franklin or the more orthodox Founders like Patrick Henry or Roger Sherman – and it is reflected in political history generally. Sustaining ordered liberty on these two supports is our legacy, and must be America’s future, as we approach our semiquincentennial.