Tillman on Stone on the Nature of the Founders' Christianity

Last fall I blogged a little bit about Geoffrey Stone's  "The World of the Framers: A Christian Nation?", which appeared in the UCLA Law Review (thanks to a pointer from our friends at co-op).  At that point I wrote that

Stone makes the important--and I would have thought obvious, except that it hasn't been much discussed of late--point that our country's founders were often 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.

Now I learn that Seth Barrett Tillman has a new paper up on ssrn that responds to Stone, called Blushing Our Way Past Historical Fact And Fiction: A Response to Professor Geoffrey R. Stone's Melville B. Nimmer Memorial Lecture and Essay.  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.  (I also fell for a different version of the story that Gibbons was banned at Harvard, in an essay on the history of the book back in 2003, I must confess--though I was using that vignette for an entirely different purpose from Stone.)  American Creation has a lengthy discussion of those points.  

But Tillman has a larger point:  that we need to know more about the nature of the founding generation's attitudes regarding the relationship between religious belief and government practice--whereas Stone focuses more on their religious beliefs.  On this bigger issue, I'm on the side of Stone: I think that the liberal Protestant views of the founding generation have implications for how we think about the nature of our country's original commitment to Christianity (or to certain types of it).   That's what I liked about Stone initially and I think that's the contribution he makes in bringing the insights of historians of the founding era to a law audience.

I'm sure that Tillman's passionate essay will invite further discussion of the role of historical context in constitutional theory.  Heck, I'm tempted to join the fray with some talk of the nature of beliefs about Christianity in the antebellum era and at the time of the framing of the Confederate 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.

Now I learn that Seth Barrett Tillman has a new paper up on ssrn that responds to Stone, called Blushing Our Way Past Historical Fact And Fiction: A Response to Professor Geoffrey R. Stone's Melville B. Nimmer Memorial Lecture and Essay.  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.  (I also fell for a different version of the story that Gibbons was banned at Harvard, in an essay on the history of the book back in 2003, I must confess--though I was using that vignette for an entirely different purpose from Stone.)  American Creation has a lengthy discussion of those points.  

But Tillman has a larger point:  that we need to know more about the nature of the founding generation's attitudes regarding the relationship between religious belief and government practice--whereas Stone focuses more on their religious beliefs.  On this bigger issue, I'm on the side of Stone: I think that the liberal Protestant views of the founding generation have implications for how we think about the nature of our country's original commitment to Christianity (or to certain types of it).   That's what I liked about Stone initially and I think that's the contribution he makes in bringing the insights of historians of the founding era to a law audience.

I'm sure that Tillman's passionate essay will invite further discussion of the role of historical context in constitutional theory.  Heck, I'm tempted to join the fray with some talk of the nature of beliefs about Christianity in the antebellum era and at the time of the framing of the Confederate Constitution.