The Bible and Christianity

If the Moral Majority, the so-called Christian Right, and evangelicals can be major forces in contemporary American politics, why should it be to anyone's surprise that religion was a major factor in the period of the founding? From a variety of motives, dogmatic rejection seems to be a principal part of the answer. The fact of the matter is that the best recent scholarship supports the proposition that the Christian perspective was alive, well, and flourishing in the period and that it was central to many of its major events.

Bible reading was ubiquitous in America throughout the period formally identified as "the founding," which benefited from the Great Awakening's revitalization of faith and coincided with the onset of the Second Great Awakening that carried well into the nineteenth century. Perry Miller remarked a generation ago, as previously noticed, that a cool rationalism such as Jefferson's might have declared the independence of such folk but could never have persuaded them to fight for it. Edmund Burke, speaking in the Commons on the eve of the Revolution (1775), stressed that the Americans' love of liberty on English principles was powerfully informed by their faith as Christians (mainly in dissenting traditions), which is fundamental to their perspective.

David Ramsay, in his contemporary (1789) History of the American Revolution, echoed Burke by writing:

The religion of the colonists also nurtured a love for liberty. They were chiefly Protestants, and all Protestantism is founded on a strong claim to natural liberty, and the right of private judgment. A majority of them were of that class of men, who, in England, are called Dissenters. Their tenets, being the Protestantism of theprotestant religion, are hostile to all interference of authority, in matters of opinion, and predispose to a jealousy for civil liberty. They who belonged to the Church of England were for the most part independents, as far as church government and hierarchy, were concerned. They used the liturgy of that church, but were without Bishops, and were strangers to those systems, which make religion an engine of state. That policy, which unites the lowest curate with the greatest metropolitan, and connects both with the sovereign, was unknown among the colonists. Their religion was their own, and neither imposed by authority, nor made subservient to political purposes. Though there was a variety of sects, they all agreed in the communion of liberty, and all reprobated the courtly doctrines of passive obedience, and non-resistance.⁶

One modern scholar has turned empirical analysis to good use in discovering that a full one-third of all citations in the enormous pamphlet literature of the period were to texts in the Bible, far more than to any other single source.⁷ George Trevelyan comments that "the effect of the continual domestic study of the [Bible] upon the national character, imagination, and intelligence for three centuries—was greater than that of any literary movement in the annals, or any religious movement since St. Augustine."⁸