Stone on the Nature of the Founders' Christianity

I have just learned that Geoffrey R. Stone's Nimmer lecture, "The World of the Framers: A Christian Nation?", has appeared in the UCLA Law Review (thanks to a pointer from our friends at co-op).  He makes the important--and I would have thought obvious, except that it hasn't been much discussed of late--point that many of our country's founders were liberal Protestants.  They took a very broad approach to their belief in God--many were deists.  They were children of the Enlightenment.  As I say, I don't think that's news to people who work in early American religion; but disciplinary barriers are mighty high and so I suspect this is an important insight for us in the law businesses.  And Stone's synthesis of the learning of the last generation of historical scholarship helps lawyers understand the religious context of our Constitution.

I might add one other point to this, which I rarely see discussed in legal literature: that the context of religious war in Europe framed our founders' approach to religion.  They had seen the violence that grew out of religious strife and wanted to contain it, to the extent that they could.

Update:  Thanks to Adam for pointing out that Stone's speech is available for podcast.  Here's a link to it.

Update 2 (April 20, 2009):  Seth Barrett Tillman has a new paper up on ssrn that responds to Stone, Blushing Our Way Past Historical Fact And Fiction: A Response to Professor Geoffrey R. Stone's Melville B. Nimmer Memorial Lecture and Essay.  I think you'll enjoy reading it.  Tillman has a couple of key points--first, that Stone made some factual errors on the nature of the Constitution's references to God and second, that Edward Gibbons' Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was not banned at Harvard at the end of the eighteenth century--it was removed from the required reading list.  (I also fell for the story that Gibbons was banned at Harvard in an essay on the history of the book back in 2003, I must confess.)  Tillman's larger point, though, is that we need to know more about the nature of the founding generations attitudes regarding the relationship between religious belief and government practice--whereas Stone focuses more on their religious beliefs.

Alfred L. Brophy

Comments

[Adam]

Thanks, Al, for touting Stone's fantastic Nimmer lecture. I listened to it as a podcast from the University of Chicago, and I was absolutely riveted.

In fact, it wasn't just the Founders who were interested in removing religion as a justificatory tenent for the particular details of socio-political association. This concern was fundamental to the entire natural rights project in the seventeenth century. The work of Hugo Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf is steeped with a substantive and aspirational goal of distinguishing natural law from divine law. From Grotius' "heretical hypothesis" -- in which he hypothetically posited that the natural law would exist and would require the protection of natural rights even if God did not exist -- to Pufendorf's "separation thesis" -- in which he explicit distinguished natural law from divine law along 6 axes of analysis -- the general theme of natural rights philosophy was to remove religion as an animating normative claim in political discourse. They succeeded in shifting the political discourse to reason and natural rights, with only a meta-ethical foundation in God as a deistic Creator of "man," and thus was born the Founders' vision of America.

Great stuff, and I think Stone does an admirable job at situating the Founders in their intellectual and historical context.