Darryl Hart of Hillsdale college has written a very encouraging and positive review of Was America Founded as a Christian Nation: A Historical Introduction at an online magazine affiliated with the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Here is a taste:
Polls reveal that close to eighty percent of Americans identify themselves as Christian. This statistic likely accounts for the approximately seventy percent of adults in the United States who think that America is a Christian nation. To answer the title of Fea’s book in the negative is a sign of disloyalty within some sectors of American society. The book is more an attempt to clarify the sets of issues that go into an answer than it is an argument about the religious character of the United States. Fea builds on years of experience as a student of the American founding and a teacher of pious undergraduates with preconceived ideas about a Christian America. Some may become frustrated that Fea takes a simple question and complicates it. But as the examples of England and Turkey suggest, “Christian-nation” status is not a simple matter….
The value of Fea’s book is not simply the careful historical questions he puts before readers that break through received religious and patriotic pieties. He also inserts sufficient distance between the United States as a political manifestation and the Christian religion, so that believers can entertain the notion that America is good even if it is not explicitly or formally Christian. Too often the categories used by Christian apologists for America lack a middle term. For them, either the nation can only be either Christian or opposed to it. Fea allows for a different category that is neither holy nor profane, one by which Christians may recognize the United States as valuable, wholesome, and virtuous (with admitted defects) without turning the nation into a Christian endeavor. Fea himself does not answer the question of his title explicitly. But his deft handling of some of the issues involved in sound historical answer will help readers be as careful as is his book.
Thanks, Darryl.
You are welcome, John.
John, I borrowed a copy of your book a few weeks ago and skimmed through it. I'm afraid that I have to disagree with Darryl's conclusion. I found several statements in your book that appear to be erroneous.
One comment that caught my attention was your dismissal of Jefferson's reference to the “Laws of Nature and of Nature's God” in the Declaration of Independence. You seemed to be unaware of the fact that this was a well known phrase even before the writing of the Declaration. In every instance that I have discovered this phrase in the literature of the eighteenth century, it has been used as a reference to God's dual revelation of Himself in both nature and Scripture. In fact, Bolingbroke himself, to whom Jefferson's use of the phrase is often attributed, used it in this manner. In his renowned letter to Alexander Pope, He wrote:
You will find that it is the modest, not the presumptuous enquirer, who makes a real, and safe progress in the discovery of divine truths. One follows nature, and nature’s God; that is, he follows God in his works, and in his word.
Thus, Jefferson's use of this phrase was in fact a direct reliance on the Bible to justify America's claim of independence. This was recognized by John Quincy Adams who stated in court that:
In the Declaration of Independence the Laws of Nature are announced and appealed to as identical with the laws of nature’s God, and as the foundation of all obligatory human laws.
Adams understood Jefferson's phrase to be a reference to two separate systems of law – the laws of nature and the laws of nature’s God – which Jefferson then equated as being identical supports for the American cause.
Thanks for the comment and your historical research on this front. You may be on to something here. Good work. I was wondering, apart from trying to interpret the past correctly, what is at stake for you in your frequent blog comments both here and elsewhere questioning my work?
I have nothing at stake personally. I simply enjoy studying history, and your book is one of several that I have been asked to review for the benefit of a small group of friends. I have only skimmed through the book so far, and I am looking forward to a more intensive reading. I have found many of your comments to be reasonable even when I disagree with your conclusions.
Great! Thanks again for the comment.