Thoughts on Teaching Early American History

Before I get into the meat of this post, here's an interesting post by Baylor history professor Thomas Kidd on Obama, Romney, and Evangelical voters.  It asks whether politics trumps theology in the presidential election.  Personally, I wonder how much trumps theology in everyday American life, but that's another story altogether.  Politics is only one area of discussion in this realm.

It appears that I will again be teaching a section of the US to 1877.  Some of the course must, of course talk about American church history, but this is not the only major topic for discussion.  There is also ideology, politics, race relations, gender relations, economics, as well as a mixture of all the above.

I try to take a middle-of-the road position when teaching history.  Some historians focus on the political and military (I don't do many battles in my class, to the consternation of some, but I love the reasons for and consequences of wars).  Others focus on what is known as social history, or history from below.  This type of history looks at the indentured servant, the slave, the domestic helper, and the yeoman farmer.  I try to look at both, because I don't think focusing entirely upon one or the other truly gives a complete picture of the past (if such a picture is possible in the first place--it isn't, but looking at all angles gives a better picture of the past).

TJ--Thomas Jefferson

When teaching American history, I am increasingly frustrated by American history texts for a couple of reasons.  There is frequently little on pre-Columbian native cultures, and there is little on the Europe that builds up to the Age of Exploration.  It is almost as if there were a few Indians here, with the exception of the Inca and Aztecs and that the Europeans were just out searching for gold.

The fact is, neither is true.  There were massively important Indian cultures in North America that had integrated trade networks with other native peoples.  Some were quite successful and more advanced than some Europeans.  Also, there were huge religious conflicts that led to exploration--Christians (Catholic and Protestant) wanting to avoid Muslim middlemen, and both groups wanting to claim souls and gold before the other could.  The rivalry was especially intense between Spain and England.  I feel the need to cover these topics extensively.

In fact, I spend much of the first half of class in Europe, because it affected so much of what happened in America.  Many Americans tend to think that the Bill of Rights was something thought up by the founding fathers.  Now, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, and Hamilton were smart guys, but they merely built upon ideas prevalent in England and other European nations.  Discussing all of these issues makes it very hard to get to 1877--but I shall try.

The Founding Fathers and Christianity

One of the blogs that I frequently check out as a student of American church history is the the Religion in American History Blog.  Today, there was a really interesting interview regarding the religious beliefs of Patrick Henry and other founding fathers. 

Baylor University professor Thomas Kidd wrote a book on Henry, and is the interviewee in this particular post.  He brings up a very important point that people often ignore.  Many people today look at the founding fathers as men of great faith and claim that most of them were fervent evangelicals.  This is simply not the case.  The other extreme is false, as well.  People on the other side of the argument try to claim that almost all of the founding fathers were deists like Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin.  Both sides of the argument have ulterior motives in trying to sell their position, but they are both wrong at the end of the day.  It is safe to say that just about all of the founders were profoundly impacted by the Judeo-Christian belief system, but actual beliefs varied widely.  For a previous post on this part of American church history, look here.

One important thing to point out about these people with widely differing beliefs is that they nevertheless came together for a common cause.  Then again, it was only a few years before the niceties wore off.  We haven't come very far in that regard over 200 years.

More on Ben Franklin's Religion

My last post discussed Benjamin Franklin's religion in relation to that of George Washington.  This post will discuss Franklin's actual belief in more detail.  As mentioned in my last post, Franklin considered himself a Deist, although he did concede that his "God," Providence, acted in his behalf at times.



Franklin found some ministers interesting, and even befriended the Great Awakening evangelist George Whitefield.  His Autobiography speaks highly of Whitefield, and on one occasion, Franklin gave all that was in his pocket to the cause of an orphanage that the evangelist planned to build in Georgia.  Franklin wrote of being somewhat turned off by a minister who plagiarized his sermons, even though he had previously supported him as the best Presbyterian minister Philadelphia had had.

However, Franklin's religion held more in common with a general set of morals than with orthodox Protestantism.  In fact, in his Autobiography, he mentioned that he rarely went to church and found that polemics against Deism actually tended to draw him to the (somewhat) newfangled belief system.  Franklin described his religious views thus in the Autobiography: "I never was without some religious principles. I never doubted, for instance, the existence of the Deity; that he made the world, and govern'd it by his Providence; that the most acceptable service of God was the doing good to man; that our souls are immortal; and that all crime will be punished, and virtue rewarded, either here or hereafter."

While he may have considered himself religious, his own words testify against his being a Christian, except perhaps a cultural Christian.  While the idea of doing good to man is a great aspiration, according to Christian doctrine, it does not lead to salvation.  There is no discussion of Jesus Christ in this statement of religious belief, only a generic trust that a God controls the universe and that this Deity watches what humans do in order to mete out justice (with a non-Christian understanding of God's justice).  A more striking contrast to the faith of John Witherspoon would be difficult to find, except for the rare eighteenth-century atheist.

Ben Franklin, George Washington, and Christianity

One of the more controversial topics in modern American discourse is the question of how Christian the American founding fathers were.  There are people on either side of the argument.  Some argue that nearly all of the founders were devout Christians, while others argue that Christianity played a marginal role in the lives of the founding fathers.  In a previous post on this topic for the occasion of Independence Day, I pointed out that John Witherspoon, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence was a practicing Presbyterian minister with a strong Christian faith.

One recent book that looked into this topic was Washington's God: Religion, Liberty, and the Father of our Country.  In this work, Michael Novak and his daughter Jana argued that Washington was a devout Anglican who had a deep faith.  One of the arguments that they make is that Washington's use of the term "Providence," or some variation thereof, generally ascribed activity in the affairs of men to Divine Providence.  This, they argue, would preclude Washington from being the Deist that some scholars describe.  One of the weaknesses of both points of view is that, from what I've read, Washington never specifically laid out his religious beliefs.  This allows either side to speculate on Washington's status as a Christian, Deist, or something entirely other.

The argument regarding Washington's use of the term Providence being inconsistent with supposed Deist belief is weakened by a close reading of Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography.  Franklin was a self-described Deist.  He specifically stated he was a Deist.  Deists tended to describe God with the analogy of a watchmaker who builds the watch (universe) and then winds it up and lets it behave according to the natural laws he set into place.  This view of God is very impersonal and argues that God does not intervene in everyday affairs.  Novak argued that Washington viewed his Providence as being active in every day life.  However, in Franklin's Autobiography, the self-described Deist wrote that he "owe[d] the mentioned happiness of [his] past life to His kind providence."  On another instance, when Franklin described the founding of the Philadelphia Academy (which would later become the University of Pennsylvania), he pointed out the need for a building to house the students and stated that "Providence threw into our way a large house ready built," which had actually been used to house the meetings of George Whitefield.  In both of these instances, a self-proclaimed Deist mentioned God as acting in the activities of man. 

In the final analysis, while its nice to find founders who were devout like John Witherspoon, the Christianity or Deism of Washington or Franklin does not impact the truthfulness of the claims of Jesus.  There can be little argument that the founders were not at least culturally Christian, and that America was not culturally Christian at its foundation.  That did not, however, make America a "Christian nation."  Washington did not wear his religious beliefs on his sleeve, so there is a lack of certainty in what he did believe.  Franklin, on the other hand, pointed out his beliefs specifically, and although he was not against religion, he was by no means a conservative evangelical.  While I found Novak's work interesting, my recent reading of Franklin weakened one of his major arguments.  I shall post more on Mr. Franklin at a later date.