The Founding Fathers

...As for the final test of true religion, most of these men are agreed that it is the civic test...

...Of our existentialist tizzies, of our positivist scruples, they are superbly innocent...

...author, "The Decline and Fall of Sex" THE critical problem for those who practice the return to religion, as it is in style today, may be defined by one question...

...Out of this indifference to absurdity and this aspiration after excellence comes an enormous energy which is not without creative impact on our social institutions...

...It is too bad that this book bears a title which suggests the sort of book which no one cares to read through himself, but which he gladly proffers for the improvement of the mind and morals of a friend...

...Or, if you like, to what point in our own religion do we return...

...What made Paine hard-headed on the subject was a firsthand experience of the organized, corporate atheism which obtained in the France of the Revolution...

...First of all, we have to reject the universalistic propositions of the Age of Reason and, with a more realistic awareness of comparative religions and irre-ligions, learn how to make discriminating judgments...

...This is something which Jefferson shares with Gibbon and Voltaire, for whom the Hebrew heritage was under attack because it was the seed-bed of the Christian superstition, and also because an attack on Judaism as an oblique assault on Christianity could with safety take on a more savage character than a direct attack on Christianity...

...But his work in turn is corrupted by "false shepherds" and "religion-builders" and "crazy theologists" until it is restored to its pristine purity by Jefferson...

...But when a religion has lost the capacity to stand in prophetic judgment on the institutions of society, both at home and abroad, then it has lost its most significant social function...

...Paine, we are reminded, was as zealous to combat atheism as he was to war against traditional religion...

...As for myself, if I draw some spiritual sustenance from this patristic literature which Norman Cousins has made available, it comes from a level somewhat deeper than that of official doctrine...

...The sharp focus of the book highlights certain aspects of personality which we may have missed in the past...

...We begin with the "depraved religion" of the Jews, with the "idle ceremonies, mummeries and observances of no effect" imposed upon them by Moses, with their God who is "cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust...

...What thrills me in this reading is that I find myself again in the company of real men...

...That with confidence they exercise their reason on the large questions of the nature and destiny of man without that passion for the piecemeal which consumes the intellects of our time...

...To work patiently toward a truth that is complex enough to satisfy the necessities of both history and reason, but clean-cut enough to draw a line at last between liberty and tyranny, love and hatred: This is still the challenge to faith...

...That with courage they make their moral and spiritual commitments, preferring to risk much in a noble adventure rather than to guard a little in a craven security...

...He is a Quaker above all in his unesthetic rationalism, in his resolve to impose upon mankind a religion as simple and silent and "drab-colored" as he alleges would have been the whole creation had the Quakers presided over it...

...The Founding Fathers In God We Trust...

...It may be the case that some religions are more iniquitous than some atheisms...

...We must learn to speak not of all religions but of some religions and of some other religions...

...A good half of the text, with propriety, goes to Thomas Jefferson and to John Adams...

...Washington is in character when he concentrates his attention on divine providence...

...John Adams believes in "all religions consistent with morals and property...

...And as we make discriminating judgments, we must dare to make judgments of value...

...It is also true that they attain to the sublime...

...By this, I mean that they acknowledge without embarrassment the mind and the soul which make human beings human...

...And if there are skeptical minds that wish to put a different interpretation on the business, we must retort that they might understand it better if they had developed an equal talent for getting providence to collaborate with them in their own purposes...

...Indeed, one may be confident that the blend of scientific rationalism with one of these other faiths must yield quite a different precipitate...

...His Rights Of Man is a secular deposit from the proclamations of the Levelers and Diggers before him...

...had been attempted to the point of a spectral and innocuous three-letter word...

...Of course, the long-run effect of this sort of thing must be that religion would lose its transcendence to culture, and become simply an accommodating mirror to reflect and to magnify the prejudices of the time...

...Many of them might say with Paine, "my own mind is my own church," but none of them would be so anarchist as to say "my own mind is my own government...

...Then we have the "reformer," Jesus, who brings us back to a pure morality...

...Moreover, the liberalism of these minds does not save one of the best of them, Jefferson, from what must be called a kind of civilized anti-Semitism...

...Jefferson is content that a religion should be a factor to preserve "peace and order...

...So in our day we confront for the first time in history an entire and enduring society, Communism, incorporated on a base of atheism and scientifically exploiting within its boundaries a "simple gospel" under the institutional auspices of a form of Christianity, in precisely the manner indicated by Hobbes...

...For some persons, the present volume will provide the answer...

...In this connection, we might remember the enthusiasm of the atheist Thomas Hobbes for the "simple gospel"—a very simple gospel, indeed...

...Paine is a Quaker in his hatred of slavery, in his passion for independence...

...There they take their stand—that God may help them if He will, as they most certainly will help themselves...

...Ignoring for the moment Jefferson's fantastic belief that all religions teach the same sort of ethics, that there is no connection between civil rights and religious convictions, that he could combine the philosophies of Epicurus and Epictetus and Jesus (we already know what Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius thought of that...

...It is, moreover, tautologous to speak of a Christian deism, because—contrary to the fond belief of these gentlemen that they espoused a universal, a natural, a rational religion—there never did arise any such doctrine against a background of Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam or Confucianism...

...Yet they are Christian deists, who find it as natural to worship with a traditional piety as to talk with a liberated tongue...

...It is obvious, for instance, that John Adams, for all his overt Unitarianism, is irretrievably a Calvinist in his estimate of human nature and in his interpretation of political institutions...

...The moral to be drawn from all this, however, can hardly be Paine's moral that we should return to the "pure, unmixed and unadulterated belief in one God, and no more...

...It does an injustice to Norman Cousins's careful work in selecting and ordering and introducing the materials, and to the vigor and individuality of the nine American Fathers who express their religious beliefs here in their own words...

...This may be called the favorite doctrine of the successful executive...

...Of course, the serious problem here for the historian is that of the relationship in these men between their heritage of Christianity and the new philosophy of the Enlightenment...

...It was Jefferson who assured us that, whether a man believes in twenty gods or none, "it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg...

...Many of them might share the bias of Madison, who would not speculate on his own place in eternity, but could entertain the idea that a "well-founded commonwealth may be immortal...

...We return to the Faith of our Fathers...

...Hamilton looks like a mere formalist in his piety, until we come to the startling realization that it may well have been a Christian scruple against killing a man for a point of honor that cost him his life in the duel with Aaron Burr...

...But it was not only Jay and John Adams who disagreed with him here, but Paine...

...But it is quite another thing to believe that the very simple gospel of this set of fathers can be taken as an adequate faith for living in these days...

...If I make these precautionary observations about the Faith of our Fathers, it is because, whatever may have been Norman Cousins's intent, more than one devout and patriotic traditionalist will be tempted to take these readings as the clue to a tidily simplified gospel for our times...

...But we also get Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Samuel Adams, John Jay and Thomas Paine...

...It is also true that a purely rational religion, without significant roots in history, must wither into an inane formalism...

...not of all atheisms but of some atheisms and of some other atheisms...

...To what religion do you return...

...Washington affirms that no bad citizen can possibly be a good Christian...

...concepts without percepts are empty...

...Only, our fathers are not the fathers of the Church of Christ but the founding fathers of the United States of America, of whom we are all in some sense the spiritual as well as the political heirs...

...It is true that Jefferson and his kind reach the ridiculous...

...It may also be the case that some atheisms are more superstitious than some religions...

...But when in another century that deism became completely detached from its base, its beliefs would become so "pure, unmixed and unadulterated" that its one God (and no more...

...Marcus Aurelius, John Calvin, Washington are united in this predilection...

...So they favor a simplified gospel and the toleration of religious differences, because for them the state takes precedence over the church...

...So Kant: Percepts without concepts are blind...

...The fact is that the deism of Paine and his contemporaries rested on a Judeo-Christian base, and gathered therefrom richness of texture and firmness of ethical purpose...

...Better, perhaps, to be one of this fellowship than one of those base Laodiceans to whom a certain prophet of the Lord said, "because thou are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth," and of whom another prophet of the Lord remarked that because they are "neither good nor bad, or are too insignificant for notice," so they, at the final judgment, "will be dropped entirely...

...And both Franklin and Paine are superb instances of the secularized Quaker...

...That he felt assured of the outcome for himself we learn from his appreciation of the reason which is bestowed upon man by God—"and I gratefully know that He has given me a large share of that divine gift...

...An admirable fighter rather than a deep thinker, Paine believed that every man must choose sides in the battle of life, and so accept his reward or punishment in a future existence, while immortality of any sort would be denied to the neutralists: "Those who are neither good nor bad, or are too insignificant for notice, will be dropped entirely...

...With Jefferson there is variation in detail...

...that the evolution of the sane society in the new republic would soon see every one a Unitarian—ignoring all this, let us inquire simply into his views of atheism and polytheism...

...Their judgments of truth are uncontaminated by skepticism, their judgments of beauty undistorted by impressionism, their judgments of goodness uncor-rupted by relativism...

...One might say that they are Christians from the neck down but deists from the eyebrows up...

...Except for Samuel Adams and John Jay, they are all deists...

...But what I find most charming about this father of our country is his persistent assault, throughout the Revolutionary War, on the habit of profane cursing and swearing among his men—"a Vice heretofore little known in an American Army...

...And we should be sympathetically appreciative of some of the rationalist illusions—most pronounced in Jefferson—which at that time facilitated the ardent championship of these precious principles...

...We should, indeed, be grateful that the principles of religious toleration and of the institutional separation of church and state were early established in this country...

...Both Franklin and Paine have the Quaker passion for simplicity, for reasonableness (though Paine is a fanatic about being reasonable), for the dutiful attention to business (though duty is an absolute for Paine, while it is always taken in moderation by Franklin), for the scientific rather than the artistic apprehension of the wonders of nature...

...It may indeed be true, as all these men perceived, that the historic "positive" religions, undisciplined by reason, must degenerate into harmful superstition...

...That he should take on such a crusade in the midst of other perilous employment not only shows him to be a sterling man of principle, but gives him a certain flavor of the romantic and quixotic which we had not suspected was a part of him...

...and the care with which, in the Leviathan, he worked out the proper exploitation of such a simple gospel by a totalitarian state...

...The awkward moral of this lesson is that no sort of "simple gospel," whether historical or rational, can be adequate to our needs...

...In our time, the complete subjection of religion to the role of civil servant is nowhere so well achieved as within the orbit of the USSR...