Celebrating the American Founding
and the Role of Christianity in Sustaining the First Two-hundred and Fifty Years
It might be interesting to inquire of the present Roman Pontiff, Leo XIV, if he has spent much time dwelling upon the life and times of King George III. This comes to mind because there are some manifest parallels between the difficulties they have each faced. But to this I shall turn below.
But it is fitting to look first at a, perhaps, more expected theme for reflection upon the occasion of this weekend’s festivities: around the 250th Anniversary of American Independence, namely, just what role has religion played in the founding and sustaining of this great country?
And what, if any, lessons there are to be drawn that can be of help to its future – given the ever growing sense of division and polarization with which its public discourse seems to be riven?
To cite the contrasting characters of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams in this context is perhaps not uncommon, yet it does in fact reward attention.
Jefferson and Adams, it is clear, both treated religion as something more than private sentiment. And this is important to note, when it would seem nowadays as though many would prefer that it be treated as something akin to a private vice – to the point, indeed, that some seem to think others should be protected from it, much as we might seek to protect people from the smoking of tobacco.
Jefferson repeatedly defended religious liberty as a matter of natural right, insisting that “religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God.” While Adams was yet more overtly affirmative about Christianity in particular, for he also believed religion was tied to moral and political seriousness. In 1813 he wrote that the “general Principles of Christianity” were among the principles on which independence was achieved.
And the importance of these perspectives for the founding of this nation is something it is important to acknowledge rather than deny if the success of this nation under God is to be sustained for the next 250 years –– as we must pray it will be!
II
But we do well to look a little more closely at the differences and parallels between the views of Jefferson and Adams, for it would be plausible to say that both men rejected crude secularism and crude theocracy, even though they drew the line of demarcation between religion and government in different places.
Jefferson’s most important religious principle was the inviolability of conscience, yet this is a concept that is now under increasing pressure of exclusion.
In his famous 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists, he declared that religion lies “solely between man and his God,” and that civil power reaches “actions only, and not opinions,” describing the Constitution as “building a wall of separation between Church and State.” But (and it is an important but) this was not a statement of hostility to religion, but rather towards jurisdiction. In other words government, he held, had no proper authority over inward belief or devotional practice. This cohered with Jefferson’s recurring claim that coercion corrupts religion, because genuine faith must be voluntary.
That principle appears again in his Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, where he condemned compulsion as “sinful and tyrannical” and insisted that a person’s civil rights have no dependence on religious opinions.
His language is unmistakably juridical and moral at once. Religion is protected, not because it is politically useful first, but because the human person possesses a sacred right to believe without coercion. For Jefferson, then, liberty of conscience is the foundation from which any sound public order must begin. Moreover, it is not to be used by the state in a way that is reductionist – which is so often the way today. As when we see religious leaders being encouraged to affirm matters to do with ecology and global warming, where the implicit message is that only insofar as they endorse these secular causes should religious believers be admitted into any public space.
And again here it is important to make a caveat, for Jefferson was not himself at all a neutral observer of religion. He wanted to distinguish what he thought to be the “authentic” moral teaching of Jesus from “later ecclesiastical accretions,” saying that in extracting the “pure principles” of Jesus one must strip away the “artificial investments” imposed by priests.
He thought the result was “the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man.” This reveals a crucial feature of Jefferson’s theology: he admired Jesus as a moral teacher while distrusting dogmatic systems, sacramental authority, and clerical institutions. Jefferson thus viewed religion in a way that was both selective and ethically focused such that a good deal was stripped out of its content – most notably in terms of salvation, redemption and the supernatural. But he did not discard Christianity entirely; rather, he reinterpreted it through the categories of moral reason, conscience, and inward sincerity.
His famous remark that “it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God” shows an ultimate indifference to pluralism as a civil fact, but not an indifference to religion as such for there was an implicit view that liberty would allow religious truth, if true, to stand but that it would do so all the better without civil enforcement.
John Adams is different and much more clearly focused on the specifically Christian.
He wrote in 1813 that, the principles on which the fathers achieved independence were “the general Principles of Christianity,” albeit joined with English and American liberty. He also insisted that these Christian principles were “eternal and immutable.”
This was very much not the way of Jefferson’s reduction of religion to moral essence. Adams’s language presumes a more public place for Christianity, as undergirding political life through the shared moral grammar it could provide – and thus unify a civic body at a higher level than merely through inward, individualized conscience alone.
Nonetheless, he was not a defender of religious establishment. In 1815 he posed the question whether “the God of nature shall govern the World by his own laws, or Whether Priests and Kings shall rule it by fictitious Miracles?” To frame the question thus is immediately to disclose an anti-clerical view and it is clear that Adams opposed priestly domination, while nonetheless not opposing religion itself.
And in a now rather modern seeming perspective, he clearly had a fear that religion, detached from reason and conscience, could be manipulated by power. But this perspective entails that his criticism of coercive religion turned not so much on disbelief, as upon political prudence and moral realism.
For all that Adams was (in)famous for saying that the world would be a better place “if there were no Religion in it,” this was profoundly corrected and qualified by his recognition that, without religion, the world would be “Hell.” And this reflects his view that religion was necessary because human beings remain morally incomplete, and that conscience disciplines vice.
This practical pragmatic support for the role of religion lay behind his 1818 letter that affirmed both belief in God and the prospect of a future state, but arguing for this on the basis that without such belief the universe would become a “boyish Fire Work.” For Adams, religion is existentially serious because it anchors human life in judgment, providence, and meaning.
All too percipient for our current realities, in the domain of secular discourse, was his underlying concern that the social consequences of religious fragmentation would be anti-intellectual dogmatism.
In 1825 he lamented laws that punished blasphemy and obstructed “free inquiry,” but also insisted that “the substance and essence of Christianity” is eternal, while extraneous accretions should be separated off.
Adams, unlike Jefferson, remained far more willing to speak of Christianity as a civilizing and enduring public inheritance. His view of religion is thus more confessional in tone, even when critical of its institutions.But the deepest difference between them lies in the realm we might call that of method.
Jefferson approached religion from the standpoint of individual rights, inward conviction, and the policing of civil authority; Adams from the standpoint of historical continuity, moral order, and the need for a religious basis for public virtue.
As one commentator has put it, Jefferson asks what government may rightly do, while Adams asks what kind of moral world can sustain free government. Jefferson is suspicious of civil religion when it becomes coercive; Adams is suspicious of politics when it loses contact with religious gravity.
Where both were in agreement was in seeing the American founding as inseparable from a moral architecture that had to be larger than anything that could be provided by politics alone. Where Jefferson placed confidence in conscience freed from establishment, Adams placed confidence in Christianity as a reservoir of public morality (at least when released from clerical control). Both therefore ultimately sought an order of things in which religion could remain vital without becoming tyrannical.
Where Jefferson champions disestablishment, conscience, and the moral sufficiency of voluntary belief, Adams defended religion as a necessary support for virtue, order, and historical continuity. Jefferson’s ideal is freedom from coercive religion; Adams’s is freedom with and for a morally serious Christianity as a powerful resource for public life.
If correct, this shows how important the mutual interactions, and indeed tensions, were between the claims of conscience, liberty, and the moral claims of religion –– and more especially the Christian religion itself –– were to the Founding of America we now celebrate and the positive future for which we now pray.
III
An Unexpected Parallel: The Case of George III and Leo XIV
But what about that parallel I suggested could be discerned between Leo XIV and George III? They have both, to their regret after all, been confronted by acts of rebellion. Acts which they seem to have been equally keen to suppress.
In the case of King George, that rebellion led to the birth of the independent United States of America – of which we celebrate the 250th anniversary this weekend.
By contrast, Pope Leo is grappling currently with a churchly rebellion constituted by the actions of Bishop Alfonso de Galarreta, assisted by Bishop Bernard Fellay, who on the 1st July consecrated as new Bishops: Fathers Pascal Schreiber of Switzerland, Michael Goldade of the United States, along with Michel Poinsinet de Sivry and Marc Hanappier, both from France. The problem for the Pope is that these consecrations were undertaken without his permission. In his eyes they thus constitute an effective declaration of independence, even though to the wider world the whole thing probably seems of rather minor scale. (Though the sponsoring entity, the Society of St. Pius Xth has 800 places of worship in 77 countries around the world, together with 733 priests and 264 seminarians).
In response, Pope Leo the next day promulgated a decree announcing that both the consecrating Bishops, and those now newly consecrated, are excommunicated latae sententiae, which is to say automatically by virtue of their having committed a particular crime in Canon Law. Yet more radically, this sentence was declared to apply also to all who follow them, which is to say around 200,000 people as well as all the SSPX priests and seminarians.
While this step may be said to be medicinal in intent, the fact remains very clear that all of those subject to this sentence are declared by the Pope to be facing eternal damnation unless they repent and are reconciled before death.
To claim such a power was never in the mind of the merely earthly sovereign King George III! But there are still some more modest parallels, after all, King George feared that American independence would lead, in the end, to the “arbitrary tyranny of chiefs” –– a way of framing things with which Pope Leo would probably agree in respect of his wayward Bishops.
And there is no question but that the American Declaration of Independence was seen by the King as a direct challenge to his lawful authority—it treated the Americans’ break with Britain as justified, and characterised King George III himself as a leader responsible for “repeated injuries and usurpations,” rather than as a legitimate sovereign who should be obeyed.
Similarly, the members of the Society of St. Pius X have alleged that the Pope has sought to act with an unfettered authority so extraordinary that it amounts to a presumption of the Divinity possessed only by Jesus Christ himself.
By comparison with that, however, any status claimed by George III was altogether more modest! And perhaps there may yet be a more modest parallel too, in that we should note George III’s pragmatic and realist side – for it was this that led him in only seven short years to the Treaty of Paris, in 1783, whereafter he acknowledged the United States was indeed a sovereign and independent country.
One has to wonder if relations between Pope Leo and the members of the Society of St. Pius X will be repaired as quickly, and if they are not – what does that say about the nature and role of the Roman Papacy?