Revolutionary Spirits: The Enlightened Faith of America's Founding Fathers
by Gary Kowalski, Bluebridge, 2008

As we digest yet another presidential campaign in which the role of religious faith in the lives of the candidates takes a central role, Gary Kowalski’s portrait of the faith of the most conspicuous Founders comes as a helpful historical reminder. Revolutionary Spirits: The Enlightenment Faith of America’s Founding Fathers surveys the religious views of six of the best-known and most frequently invoked of the Founders of the United States of America (Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Paine, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison), and finds their spiritual leanings grounded in the Enlightenment ideals of reason, science, and progress. Through anecdotes, samples from handwritten letters, reports of those who knew them, and a bit of careful inference, Kowalski shows that they were neither the atheists some of their contemporaries accused them of being, nor were they orthodox Christians who sought to establish a Christian nation, as some claim today.

Kowalski, a Unitarian Universalist minister, Harvard Divinity School graduate, and author of The Souls of Animals and Science and the Search for God, combines history, biography, theology, science, and philosophy to tell the story of not only the faith of these Founders, but also the social and cultural milieu that gave shape to their ideas and their lives. Like Unitarian Universalists today, the Founders, as Kowalski describes them, would agree that the sources of their faith were the “Humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science and warn us against the idolatries of the mind and spirit.”

According to Kowalski, each was a liberal in the truest sense, “one who cherishes liberty,” and all were progressives who believed “in the doctrine of progress.” Theirs was a faith that was practical and “natural,” in the sense that the natural world was the place where each of them found evidence of divine intelligence. Each in his way was captivated by the scientific discoveries and theories of the day, and each participated in the public discourse of science within his specific area of interest. Predictably, this affected their faith stances, and Kowalski claims the Founders were “influenced less by biblical religion than by the intellectual awakening known as the Enlightenment.”

Certainly, as Kowalski reminds us, the Enlightenment project in Europe and the Deist theology with which it was related became associated with “a cerebral, cold-blooded philosophy,” but he claims that in America it was “seldom atheistic: more often it was soulful, earnest, and intensely moral.” Specifically, Kowalski asserts, “[The Founders’] enlightened faith is key to understanding the spiritual identity of the country.” While this seems most certainly true, it is only one half of the story.

The ideal of religious freedom—not mere tolerance—first arrived on American soil in Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1632 with the appearance of a young Puritan preacher named Roger Williams. Williams was called to serve in a parish by the Colony’s governor, John Winthrop, who was a staunch defender of the Puritan message. However, upon arrival, Williams almost immediately began questioning the forced conformity in matters of faith that was central to the colony’s attempts at creating cohesion, and presumably safety, in very uncertain circumstances. Over 100 years before the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom was passed, Roger Williams wrote:

Sixthly, it is the will and command of God that (since the coming of his Son the Lord Jesus) a permission of the most paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or antichristian consciences and worships, be granted to all men in all nations and countries; and they are only to be fought against with that sword which is only (in soul matters) able to conquer, to wit, the sword of God’s Spirit, the Word of God.

Some scholars believe that John Locke may have read this treatise written by Roger Williams while he was back in England negotiating the charter for the colony of Rhode Island —land Williams had purchased “from love” from the native people of the area. That was another of Williams’ shocking perspectives on Massachusetts Bay Colony: he believed the land on which the colony was founded belonged to the native people living there, not to the King of England who ratified its charter.

In contrast to the ideal of full religious liberty originating from Enlightenment principles, Williams derived his notion of freedom from the Protestant belief in each human’s direct relationship with the divine. After seeing the ravages of religious wars and persecutions during his own childhood in England, Williams could not believe that the God of his Christian Bible could sanction either bloodshed or hypocrisy in exchange for a vain confession of faith. Williams called for “a hedge of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world.” Williams’s defense of free conscience also had secular influences—as a young man he was a clerk to Sir Edward Coke, an early defender of citizens’ rights and a challenger of the tyranny of monarchy.

It is true that the faith of the Founders Kowalski describes is a key to understanding America’s spiritual identity, but so is the faith of the first Puritan settlers, a faith that gave rise to mottos such as “united we stand, divided we fall.” The cohesion of the congregation of the faithful, Winthrop’s “city on a hill,” was meant to be a beacon to the world of what a community united could accomplish even in harsh conditions.

The relationship between these two contributions to our collective spiritual identity has been, and continues to be, evident. It is codified in the Constitution and Bill of Rights: one provides for our common compact, and one for the protection of individual rights. Even the first clause of the First Amendment, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,” applied only to the federal government at the time of its ratification. Although Madison advocated extending the protection for religious liberty to the states, this compromise allowed the states that still had tax supports for religious institutions to avoid disestablishment until ratification of the 14th Amendment — after the Civil War.

Kowalski makes several references to the failure of the Founders to directly address the issue of slavery as they crafted the Constitution, and their hope that future generations would be better able to deal with it, but he does not explicitly connect this failure to their practicality and belief in progress. Unfortunately, even after a bloody Civil War that ended slavery as an institution, it took the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. to demand that the time was now, over the well-meaning advice of many white liberals to wait for a better time, to address the legacy of inequity that still existed for Blacks in America in the 1950s and 1960s. It is interesting to note that Gandhi inspired King ’s activism, and the success of the movement he led was in large part thanks to the organizational strength of the Black Churches. Rather than Enlightenment principles such as Reason, King, according to his wife, believed that “love is the eternal religious principle.” King’s contribution to the history of our collective spiritual identity reveals the deeply important role that emotional religious expression has played in making real the promise of freedom that was written into the Constitution.