I’ve been reading through Gordon Wood’s exemplary Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 and noticed something interesting.
During the 1780s and 90s a political division grew between Federalists and anti-Federalists. The Federalist faction supported a strong central government that could act as a check on the democratic excesses of the state legislatures and proposed a standing army to defend that government from riots or revolution, a trenchant fear in the years after the so-called Whiskey Rebellion. The Federalists favored a Constitution that would delineate federal prerogatives.
The anti-Federalists adhered to a liberal tradition which pulled from 17th century Whig thought. These English Whigs believed that absolutist governments aggrandized themselves as the expense of the people. Thus the anti-Federalists feared a strong central government and initially opposed a Constitution that gave the federal government broadened powers.
What Wood does not emphasize, though, is another key difference between these two political factions. The anti-Federalists ascribed to a rosy understanding of human nature. As Wood notes (11-13),
People, however humble and uneducated, possessed a sympathetic social instinct and a moral intuition that told them right from wrong. …
If only the natural tendencies of people to love and care for one another were allowed to flow freely, unclogged by the artificial interference of government, particularly monarchial government, the most devout republicans like Paine and Jefferson believed, society would prosper and hold itself together. …
Many Revolutionary Americans imagined a new and better world emerging, a world, according to some clergymen, of “greater perfection and happiness than mankind has yet seen.” In this New World Americans would build a harmonious republican society of “comprehensive benevolence” and become the “eminent example of every divine and social virtue.”
Anti-Federalists thought that people were essentially good. The bad things which happened, like war, were a result of government corruption, the self-aggrandizing tendency of absolute governments. By dissolving the central government, Jefferson thought, they would “destroy the strange idea of their being a permanent body, which has unaccountably taken possession of the heads of their constituents, and occasions jealousies injurious to the public good.”
The Federalists were rather more skeptical of humankind’s nature. In 1795 arch-federalist Alexander Hamilton was faced with a crisis between Great Britain and the United States. He advocated increasing the size of the military while negotiating for peace. Anti-federalists feared a large military because they believed that its existence would tempt the government to engage in wars of aggression. But Hamilton did not believe that government was the ultimate source of human ills. Rather, “the seeds of war are sown thickly in the human breast.” Wood writes (195),
Hamilton saw the world made up of competing nation-states, with republics being no more peace-loving than monarchies. The sources of war, he said, did not lie in the needs of funding systems, bureaucracies, and standing armies, as the Republicans assumed; they lay in the natural ambitions and avarice of all human beings.
What is so fascinating about these contrasting views of human nature is that they are thoroughly secularized. The antagonists on either side – most notably Hamilton and Jefferson – were not known for their religiosity. Wood writes (11),
While most clergymen continued to urge Christian love and charity upon their ordinary parishioners, many other educated and enlightened people sought to secularize Christian love and find in human nature itself a scientific imperative for loving one’s neighbor as one-self. “Just as the regular motions and harmony of the heavenly bodies depend upon their mutual gravitation towards each other,” said liberal Massachusetts preacher Jonathan Mayhew, so too did love and benevolence among people preserve “order and harmony” in society. Love between humans was the gravity of the moral world, and it could be studied and perhaps even manipulated more easily than the gravity of the physical world.
So although religion qua religion plays little role in the discussion, there are certainly religious ghosts in the machine.
This discussion has implications for the modern “Was America a Christian nation?” debate. Although many of the founding fathers were not Christian in a sense that modern evangelicals would recognize, their ideas were clearly influenced by a secularized form of theology.
This story should also be a reminder of the importance of broadening the horizons of religious history. These “religious ghosts in the machine” pop up all over the place. Religion can even be found among the irreligious.
This is an interesting idea, and I wonder how much something like it continues to shape American political culture. For instance, I suspect the commonplace Rawlsian account of political justice owes quite a bit to traditional Christian categories, even though Rawls himself tried to be explicitly secular.
Do you know if there are any good books about this idea?
I certainly agree, Paul, that there are what you call “ghosts in the machine” or enduring patterns of religion in irreligion. You’re discussing ideas of depravity or innate goodness that persist; here are a few other religious patterns that persist even among the irreligious: http://religioninamerica.org/2009/10/20/religious-patterns-of-thought-in-american-history/
I’d suggest, though, that the Federalists and Democratic-Republicans were not so neatly divided on this question. Both were heirs to the Whig tradition, and both were heirs to Protestant or more broadly Christian ideas. As evidence for the murkiness, I offer this passage from Common Sense by Thomas Paine, who was definitely more in the democratic, revolutionary, and enlightened religious tradition of Jefferson:
There we have both the notion that government is evil, and that government is necessary because of man’s innate depravity. The blurring of the two ideas where are not entirely consistent, I take to be the product of Paine’s insincerity. Religious language permeates Common Sense, but Paine is making arguments that his audience will believe though he does not. Still, the enormous popularity of Common Sense could be evidence that plenty of people in revolutionary America held both ideas at once.
I think I used an incorrect character in my comment, so my quoted portion didn’t appear. I was particularly referring to the “secularized form of theology,” though I suppose the comment isn’t completely odd as a response to the whole post.
@Andrew: To be frank, this is early for me. Woods is one entry on an extensive booklist that I’m reading through in order to get a better context for the research I’m doing for Thomas Kidd. But I’ll keep my eyes pealed for something tracing the theological origins of America’s civil religion.
@Lincoln: I’ve perhaps done a bit of a disservice to Woods. He points out that Paine, Jefferson and company believed not in the innate goodness of human nature, but in mankind’s inherent sociability. I’m not completely certain of the distinction, but it seems that they believed that government was a necessary evil because men (other men, not themselves of course) were corruptible, but that this government should tread lightly because men have this natural, social desire.
@Andrew: Are you looking for works on civil religion?
If so, the classic work remains Robert N. Bellah, “Civil Religion in America”, as well as Bellah’s The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in a Time of Trial. Also notable are Catherine Albanese’s Sons of the Fathers: The Civil Religion of the American Revolution, Harry Stout’s Upon the Altar of a Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War, and Charles Reagan Wilson’s Baptized in Blood: the Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920.