America’s National Origin Myth

Benjamin Franklin:

And so what did Benjamin Franklin think of all this?  In his autobiography, Franklin–a freethinker if there ever was one–stated: “I have found Christian dogma [to be] unintelligible.”  Elsewhere, Franklin announced that “revealed religion has no weight with me.”  Nor did it with any of the other major Founders of the American Republic.  This was no anomaly.

Franklin observed that, “The way to see by Faith is to shut the eye of Reason.”  This from a man who regularly attended the services of myriad denominations as a gesture of solidarity–and good will–to his fellow citizens (many of whom were devout Christians).  As with Jefferson and Madison, Franklin recognized that Christianity was an integral part of the new American culture; yet he also recognized that the foundations of the new Republic existed independently of any specific doctrine.  For he recognized that there was a distinction to be made between piety and probity.  It is for precisely this reason that the sagacious Franklin criticized all religions for making “orthodoxy more regarded than virtue”.  In other words: The sine qua non was MORALITY, not religiosity.  Religion was valued INSOFAR AS it was often the vehicle for promulgating virtue.

A French acquaintance of Franklin claimed that “our Freethinkers have adroitly sounded him on his religion.  And they maintain that they have discovered he is one of their own—that is: that he has [no religion] at all.”  If Franklin COULD be said to have had a religion, it was strictly utilitarian.  As Gordon Wood put it: “He praised religion for whatever moral effects it had, but for little else.”  Franklin noted that divine revelation had “no weight with me,” and the covenant of grace seemed “unintelligible” and, in any case, “not beneficial”.  For Freethinkers, institutionalized dogmatism is NEVER edifying.

What did Franklin think of mixing religion and government? He noted, regarding the many pious hypocrites who have led nations across history: “A man compounded of law and gospel is able to cheat a whole country with his religion and then destroy them under color of law.”

To reiterate: It is important not to get thrown off by idiomatic expressions intimating religiosity. The prolific use of idiomatic expression by the Republic’s Founders is important to grasp.  Conflating poetic invocations of Providence (which are figurative) with a literal mandate from heaven (which is delusive and imperialistic) paves the way for theocracy.  Mandates from heaven are patently anti-democratic; as such claims can be put in the service of even the most heinous policies—as we see today with, say, the Judean Settler Movement of Israel.  With the imprimatur of god, anything goes—be it “Gott mit Uns” (Nazi) or “Mafdal” (Revistionist Zionist).

The Founders of the American Republic would have ALL be baffled by the claims of “Christian Nationalism”; and they would have utterly horrified by it most fanatical incarnation: “Christian Dominionism”, predicated as it was on hyper-dogmatic, literalist readings of scripture in conjunction with a pathologically tribalistic mindset (read: hegemony based on racism).  Their appeals to “natural law”, though grounded in the idiom of theism (in the spirit of Locke and Montesquieu), were categorically secular.  It makes sense, then, that the Declaration of Independence was—above all—an Enlightenment document, not a religious document.  This was consummate with the writings of Thomas Paine, who—more than anyone else—instigated AND rationalized the American Revolution.

It is worth recapitulating: For both Washington and Franklin, the virtue of ritual observance was community, not piety.  So when we hear that some of the Founders attended church, we should keep in mind that they were not being dogmatic; they were simply being pragmatic.  To take their deferential orientation toward Christianity as BEING Christian is to misread their modus operandi.

Clinging to this faux history entails remaining mired in a daze of Reality-denial.  As I hope to have shown here, the suggestion that the U.S. Constitution could not have been formulated BUT FOR Judeo-Christian doctrine is entirely spurious.  It depends on eliding the fact that Judeo-Christian doctrine really had nothing to do with anything that the U.S. Constitution asserts.  Those who persist in touting the trope that “America was founded as a Christian nation” are grossly ill-informed; and merely parroting a piece of gilded lore they find tremendously gratifying.

Such ignorance is not benign.  A danger of religiously-charged national origin myths is that they are often deployed to rationalize morally questionable enterprises.  As we’ve seen, a dubious historiography can be put in the service of an even more dubious destiny.  The non-sequitur goes as follows: “This is where we came from; therefore this is what we shall do henceforth…to fulfill our destiny!”

In the case of America, Judeo-Christian identity has been invoked to justify “Manifest Destiny”–from the jungles of Indo-China to the jungles of Latin America.  This candy-coated hubris continues to be the main source of American Exceptionalism.  Such delusive thinking, based as it is on a Christian theocratic mindset, also comes in handy for those who insist that the zygotes of homo sapiens are full-fledged humans, that religious institutions should enjoy tax exemption, and that evolution should not be included in the curricula of public schools.  Such positions are all based on farce; but it is EXTREMELY USEFUL farce.  For all such positions serve an ideological purpose.  The more people become educated on this matter, the less purchase faux histories will have on credulous minds.

Consideration of “original intent” should not be merely a matter of where we started; it must be a matter where we are headed.  After all, civil society is not as much about this or that legacy as it is about possibility. 

Democracy is not something to be preserved, as if a corpse kept in a vat of formaldehyde; it is something to be maintained, like a living body that is exposed to the elements and given a steady flow of nutrients (even as it is being constantly subjected to stress tests).  Put succinctly: Democracy is not a destination, it is an on-going process.

Civil society is never on auto-pilot, as it requires active participation from a well-informed citizenry.  (Any genuine democracy is a PARTICIPATORY democracy.)  The vaunted “Founders” of the American Republic knew that civil society is not sustained via interminable revanchism, but sustained by perpetual improvement.  And so it went: The Constitutional Convention was seen as a point of departure, not a fait accompli.  The participants all recognized that democracy is aspirational, not atavistic; a progression rather than a retrogression.  Revanchism plays no role in this on-going process.

The Constitution isn’t just about where we came from; it’s about where we’re going.  The American Republic is, after all, a work in progress.

Understanding what liberal democracy REALLY IS entails coming to terms with history–our own and others’.  One might even go so far as to say that being honest about the origins of the United State is the Christian thing to do.