American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation

It is the last Sunday of the month meaning it’s time for a look at religion, making this weeks book American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation by Jon Meacham. So let’s do this.

This book was written, I believe, in response to the culture wars, specifically the question of Are We a Christian Nation?

The short answer is no...with caveat’s. A LOT of caveats. Meacham explores what we know about the founding fathers and their faith, which we actually know quite a lot, from the writings they left behind.

And right out the gate, there can be no doubt that our founding fathers were Christian. Every one of them. Many of them did not subscribe to a particular religion like Catholicism, or Baptist or Episcolpalian, or Lutherism. But All of them believed in a God, a Creator, a Nature’s God.

There’s a reason why the Declaration of Independence specifically reads:

“The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

This particular wording was chosen specifically to allow for what would follow: absolute freedom of religion. Multiple documents reflect the acknowledgment that God means different things to different people, including all denominations of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam….we’ll circle back on that in a bit.

For now, the First Amendment. Which was carefully worded “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

This allows for you to follow the god of your conscience. And the early American’s allowed for that as well. Religion was not the contentious issue Hollywood would have you believe. Yes, in the slums, there were the gangs of New York, the Irish and the Italians were looked down on for being Catholic. But this was not actually an issue with the leaders of the nation, back in the day. “The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time.”—Thomas Jefferson.

“Religion and Liberty must flourish or fall together in America. We pray that both may be perpetual.” – Reverend William Smith, Doctor of Divinity, June 23, 1775.

Not God. Religion. And as Meacham says, “The great good news about America – the American Gospel, if you will -- is that religion shapes the life of the nation without strangling it. Belief in God is central to the country’s experience, yet for the broad center, faith is a matter of choice, not coercion, and the legacy of the Founding is that the sensible center holds.”

Meacham follows this by saying “Our finest hours-- the Revolutionary War, abolition, the expansion of the rights of women, fights against terror and tyranny, the battle against Jim Crow-- can partly be traced to religious ideas about liberty, justice, and charity. Yet, theology and scripture have also been used to justify our worst hours—from enslaving black people to persecuting Native Americans to treating women as second class citizens.”

That’s the beauty of the human experience. We are all, each of us, a walking contradiction. Because we are all human. What we condemn in complete strangers we’ll make excuses for when it’s a loved one. It takes a great deal of spiritual fortitude to hold everyone to the same standard. And the founders believed that spiritual fortitude could be found in religion.

And they’re not necessarily wrong. Faith in SOMETHING tends to make people happier overall.

For all that, Meacham doesn’t actually explore the happiness metric. He explores the position of religion with morality. He explores all the ways faith—not GOD, but FAITH—has helped to make America the land of free.

After the introduction, he goes back to the beginning, and of course every school child learned about the Pilgrims coming to America for religious freedom. I mean...Gen-X learned that. Who knows what bullshit Gen Z and Gen Alpha are being taught. Probably something about appropriation and brutality. Pretty sure they are not taught about how the Catholics did effectively end the human sacrificial rituals of the Aztecs.

Don’t get me wrong, the Catholics did destroy vast stores of knowledge when they explored Mexico. But they also put an end to human sacrifice. So...contradictions. They were not perfect. But they did save, at least physically, millions.

Meacham then circles back through the American Revolution, through the Civil War and how both sides used scripture to justify the war. One must pause though and consider...If both sides truly believed the bible, then when the South Lost, did anyone in the South pause and wonder if their scriptural interpretation was maybe wrong? Like, maybe God WAS speaking, and determined the North was right, and Slaves SHOULD be free?

Meh, that is not the topic of this book.

Meacham goes through both world wars, the great depression, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights eras, and into the War on Terror, citing various documents from various political and religious leaders to showcase his point: We are a religious nation, but not a Christian one.

Religion matters. Faith matters. He even acknowledges the right to be atheist and believe in nothing. But you do not have the right to insist others abandon their faith for your comfort.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. Insisting Congress remove all religion from all public works is a violation of the first amendment.

On the topic of Islam, the founders were actually quite accepting, as inheritors of the Age of Reason and Enlightenment, to the concept of different means of worship. That there were multiple paths to God. What they were not aware of, because the concept wasn’t discussed until 1945, was the Paradox of Tolerance, which was first discussed by Karl Popper in that year.

The Paradox of Tolerance is “Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. […] We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.”

So the founding fathers allowed for unlimited religious tolerance. The outcome of that is what we are seeing in Europe now, where Sweden has had a sharp contraction against their open tolerance of that most intolerant of religions, Islam. And yes...Islam is wildly intolerant of anyone not Muslim. If the Founding Fathers had a crystal ball and could see how wildly awry their tolerance of religion would go, would they have been more forceful in spelling out God? I somehow doubt it.

Mostly because they knew while the founders were still very much alive, how volatile Islam could be. These were educated men. Classically educated, they pretty much all spoke Greek and Latin, most of them spoke other languages in addition to English. They knew about the crusades and the long onslaught of Islam across Christian lands. I think, though, they genuinely believed Enlightenment had swept the globe, a belief that lasted up until 1801 and the first Barbary Coast war, led by Thomas Jefferson as commander in chief.

The author was well aware of the contradictions of seeking freedom while holding slaves. He makes no excuses for that historical anomaly. But he does acknowledge the absolute humanity of our founding fathers, which is to say, they made mistakes. They were human. Everyone makes mistakes. The beauty of the system they left us is the ability to correct the record. Which we did with the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments.

Are we a Christian Nation? No. But we were built to be a religious nation. As John Adams famously said “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Religion teaches morality. This is not to say lack of religion makes for amorality. But...well….look around. Look at the moral decay that has come as religion and faith declines. I think religion is incredibly important for the soul. And the founding fathers seem to have believed as much, at least as told by the in depth research of Jon Meacham.

He is an incredible author, I read several books by him when I was reading about the Presidents. This book was no exception, it was an easy read and a fast read, it’s well documented and includes extension excerpts in the appendices to show exactly what documents Meacham was pulling from to draw his conclusions.
Review is up on YouTube and Rumble.