Perspective #92
Our Founders: Sharper Than Evangelicals? America 250
If we want to consider the founders of the USA from a born-again or evangelical doctrinal perspective, they would typically, but not exclusively, fail. However, if we assess several aspects of cultural (or common grace) Christianity, then and now, what would we find? My reflection has led me to think that they may have had more biblical knowledge and a sharper understanding of its applications than many evangelical Christians today. By our secular standards today, they might appear to be actual, even partisan, Christians.
Consider these points:
Dimensions of Christian literacy and frameworks of understanding:
• Personal biblical literacy.
• Acceptance of a biblical framework of morality as a cultural norm
• Acceptance of the terms ‘divine, creator, providence’ as legitimate and God-centered
• Understanding that a biblical-theocratic monarchy is inappropriate for America
• Understanding that human nature is noble but also deeply flawed
• Understanding that there is such a thing as evil
• Understanding that the government must separate powers to avoid tyranny
• Affirmation of biblical categories of wisdom, dignity, and the place of initiative and work
• Respect for the church as a cultural institution.
Grade the founders: Read that list carefully, give our founders, and then our leaders today, an estimated letter grade. This exercise will help quantify my assessment without proving it. I think many would agree that the founders would get Bs (with As and Cs), while today’s secular politicians would rate (maybe proudly) Ds and Fs. That’s quite a gap. I call this evidence of their relatively high view, or biblical understanding, of issues of common grace, though many were weak and a few openly opposed to God’s saving grace in Jesus. Today, they might even be labeled (and libeled) as Christian nationalists. While many of the earliest compacts are explicitly Christian, the Declaration is less so. Together, the founders suggest a robust commitment to something far more Christian than science, blind fate, or a secular view. Let’s look deeper.
We should not be surprised that these men represent a Christian aspect of the Scottish Enlightenment rather than the French Enlightenment. The foundational difference is the place of violence. The French Enlightenment was based exclusively and angrily on reason. The Christian segment of the Scottish Enlightenment acknowledged God while noting and pursuing the reason and reasonableness of God and his work in nature and in our salvation. This would be true of deists who retained much but did not want to retain the Jehovah-God of the bible, nor salvation in Jesus. They were content to thrive mostly on their own.
The difference in outcomes of the two revolutions is that the American founding removed obstacles and opened the door to opportunity for newly freed people. By contrast, the French Revolution killed aristocrats and Frenchmen associated with the church or monarchy, leaving the people with no clear path and opening the door for Napoleon to assume the role of strongman. My recent conversation with Michael Graham of the Timothy Keller Center affirmed this interpretation just after his presentation at Grace College, where he argued that the founders were not typically Christians and did not establish an expressly Christian nation.
It dawned on me at our USA-250 reenactment of Thomas Jefferson that a fully Christian nation might have established a Christian monarch like David. However, the language of the people, by the people, and for the people, and insistence on not having a European-style state religion demonstrates that they were limiting Christianity to an influence. Today, the Brits have a rigid and useless national church; we ditched that in 1776.
Mark Noll, a Christian historian at Notre Dame, has carefully evaluated the Christian nature of our founding. He laments the blurring of the lines of distinction between faith and politics, where Christianity either becomes a servant of the state or is confused with Israel’s laws seeking to impose those laws in the U.S.
Drawing on my Co-Pilot research assistant, Noll teaches that the founding was shaped by Christian ideas coupled with natural law and common-sense philosophy. Reason played a strong role, as did Christian moral assumptions. He noted that founders used biblical vocabulary and thought in biblical categories (such as dividing power due to our sinful inclination to gain political power). That’s quite a bit of influence from men, few of whom were what we would call evangelical Christians; more like a legitimate Christian Enlightenment.