Christianity and the Founders

Andrew Sullivan posted an item on the likely religious beliefs of the first few Presidents. If you follow the links, you get to this list, which shows that Andrew Jackson may have been the first President whose faith could be considered “evangelical” in the modern sense; the six presidents before him were Unitarians or “theistic rationalists.” Which is not surprising. If you believe Mark Noll, the establishment prior to the Second Great Awakening was made up of Unitarians and austere Reformed Presbyterians and Congregationalists. Andrew Jackson, notably, came from the West, where the more “evangelical,” less politically-minded strains of Christianity had taken root. The “second founding” of American religion occurred during Jackson's time, and it ran completely counter to the predictions of the founders concerning religion and the American Republic. Here's part of Noll's account of the era, from First Things:

“No other period of American history has ever witnessed such a dramatic rise in religious adherence as took place from 1800 to 1860. In no other period did main religious habits break so directly with what had gone before. In no other period has there been such a radical upsetting of the main assumptions about how to organize and practice religious faith.

“Expectations in the early years of national history, and from some of the wisest Americans of the founding period, highlight how different the new American religion was. During the early days of the Continental Congress, the Baptist leader Isaac Backus came to Philadelphia to complain about the hypocrisy of ­Massachusetts in protesting against “enslavement” by Parliament when Massachusetts itself was persecuting Baptists and other Protestant dissenters. In response, John Adams told him that the Massachusetts establishment of religion was, in fact, very light; moreover, in Adams’ view, it was more likely that the sun would not rise than it was for Massachusetts ever to give up the establishment of religion. Only a little later, such notable Founding Fathers as John Jay, Patrick Henry, and John Witherspoon all campaigned for a dispersed establishment whereby tax money would be collected by state governments and then distributed to all the churches that petitioned for a share.

“Other expectations of what religion would look like in the new republic included the prediction welcomed by Thomas Jefferson, but decried as a catastrophe by Jefferson’s religious opponents, that the United States would come to favor the rational, enlightened, and ameliorative faith of Unitarianism. As late as 1820, Jefferson wrote a young friend that he expected some form of Unitarianism to be the dominant religion in the United States. That prospect, which so encouraged Jefferson, was anathema to his foes, but many of them thought it just might happen, as testified by the religious militancy of their fierce opposition to Jefferson in the presidential campaign of 1800.

“For their part, many leaders of the Congregational and Presbyterian denominations expressed the confidence that some form of established or quasi-established Calvinist faith would exert preeminent religious influence over the new republic. They were not entirely wrong, especially since American higher education continued to be conducted as primarily a Presbyterian or Congregational enterprise until well past the mid-nineteenth century. But the idea that the nation as a whole would be docilely led by the Presbyterian Princeton of John Witherspoon and Samuel Stanhope Smith, the Congregationalist Yale of Ezra Stiles and Timothy Dwight, or the pastor-leaders of Union ­College and the many other colleges founded more or less as Reformed Protestant academies—that idea was a fantasy.”