The Wall Street Journal
A strong current of religious belief ran through the young American nation, but so did a countercurrent of doubt and freethinking. D.G. Hart reviews “Skepticism and American Faith” by Christopher Grasso.
Federalist cartoon from 1800 showing God’s eye as it watches an American eagle prevent Thomas Jefferson from sacrificing the U.S. Constitution on the altar of French despotism. PHOTO: THE LIBRARY COMPANY OF PHILADELPHIA
Religious nationalism is now out of favor for many Americans, but as recently as 1942 you could hear Franklin Roosevelt justify America’s involvement in World War II with biblical rhetoric. In his State of the Union address that year, Roosevelt declared not only that the world was too small for “Hitler and God” but that the United States was fighting “inspired by a faith that goes back through all the years to the first chapter of the Book of Genesis.” The idea that “God created man in His own image,” he said, was the reason to fight and “uphold the doctrine that all men are equal in the sight of God.”
Of course, it would be wrong to imply that FDR was drawing on a continuous and unquestioned cultural tradition of piety and biblical reverence. Only 17 years before, William Jennings Bryan had become an object of ridicule during the Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tenn., for his fundamentalist beliefs about creation. Even the Declaration of Independence presents a less than clear picture of the role of religion in the national idea. The 1776 justification of the country’s founding appealed to “Nature’s God” and grounded unalienable rights in a “Creator’s” decree. But the author of that language, Thomas Jefferson, was not an orthodox Christian by any means, preferring a deist Unitarianism to traditional Protestantism.
PHOTO: WSJ
SKEPTICISM AND AMERICAN FAITH
By Christopher Grasso
Oxford, 649 pages, $34.95
Oxford, 649 pages, $34.95
Christopher Grasso, who teaches history at the College of William and Mary, is keenly aware of the tension between believers and nonbelievers in American history. Indeed, that tension is the theme of “Skepticism and American Faith,” a revealing look at religion in the new nation. The period he covers runs from roughly 1800 to the Civil War, a time during which, Mr. Grasso argues, disagreements over belief and skepticism were especially acute.
Pursuing this theme requires Mr. Grasso to devote a lot more space to books, speeches, pamphlets and newspaper accounts—the places where such ideas play out—than to the laws and policies of the federal and state governments, where politicians and voters matter more than the authors of books. At times the lives of the people arguing for either faith or skepticism take a back seat to the ideas they espouse. Those deficiencies notwithstanding, Mr. Grasso’s book shines a light on an aspect of America’s cultural history that is too often neglected. His chief contribution is to put on center stage a cast of skeptics and freethinkers whom historians often relegate to the wings.
Some of these figures may well be familiar, like the patriot Ethan Allen. Most of us know him for his military successes—he and his Green Mountain Boys, of course, became heroes for capturing Fort Ticonderoga from the British early in the Revolutionary War—and not for his arguments against “priestcraft.” In 1785, Mr. Grasso reminds us, Allen published “Reason, the Only Oracle of Man,” a book that “urged readers to discard the warped theologies derived from ancient biblical fables.”
Many other skeptics in Mr. Grasso’s chronicle are obscure, like John Fitch, the inventor of an early steamboat well ahead of Robert Fulton. He went from Universalism (the belief that everyone will be saved) to deism, which featured a belief in the Creator but in few tenets of Christianity. In Philadelphia, Fitch helped to form the Universal Society, a kind of philosophical discussion club whose leader, Elihu Palmer, a former Baptist preacher, proudly denied the divinity of Christ. Later in Mr. Grasso’s chronicle comes the remarkable tale of John R. Kelso, a schoolteacher, Civil War combatant (fighting Confederate guerrillas in Missouri) and congressman. In his autobiography, written in the third person, Kelso described his despair, in the 1840s and ’50s, at being unable to find the faith that he believed to be essential to his salvation. “Therefore, he went boldly forward and having once dared to use his reason, he soon emerged from the darkness of ignorance and superstition, and into the light and gladness of truth. His fetters were broken and he became a free man.” And yet Kelso returned to a kind of deism after the war. Mr. Grasso takes Kelso to be an emblem for many Americans of the period, caught between reason and faith.
For the side of Christianity, Mr. Grasso includes the obvious (e.g., Timothy Dwight, Jonathan Edwards’s grandson, who presided over Yale College) along with the all but forgotten, like Jedidiah Morse, a prominent New England Congregationalist who defended both Calvinism and the Federalist Party at the turn of the 19th century to help keep the American Revolution from turning into a version of the French one, with its religious skepticism and political radicalism. On the eve of the Civil War, James Henley Thornwell, a South Carolina Presbyterian, attacked abolitionists, who, he thought, favored a lamentably loose interpretation of the Bible because they discarded the parts they found objectionable. Mr. Grasso also tells the story of Ezra Stiles Ely, a Presbyterian minister who founded Marion College, on the western banks of the Mississippi in Missouri, a school that would prove, he hoped, faith’s compatibility with reason. The institution failed not so much because of skepticism’s success but because flood waters and the financial panic of 1837 sank the college.
These efforts and disputes, Mr. Grasso contends, were at the center the country’s search for a self-definition. Was America to be a society that owed its stability to faith or was it going to foster liberty in such a way that made freethinking the norm? By 1861 the need for a civil religion supplied the answer. Mr. Grasso lets Lincoln, by no means an orthodox believer, have the last word. Lincoln knew firsthand the appeal of freethinking but contended that unbelief should not “insult the feelings” of the majority’s faith. The appeal of such civil religion is one reason that American presidents in times of crisis—from Lincoln to Roosevelt and beyond—appeal more often to God than to reason.
Mr. Hart teaches history at Hillsdale College and is the Novakovic Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.