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| This Declaration mentions a Supreme Being, but the nontheism of the authors is universally acknowledged. Image via VideoGamesAndTheBible. |
Spent an awful lot of time yesterday commenting in a vast and fancy-ass academic thread at Crooked Timber, which ran for some reason a post by the George Washington University political theorist Samuel Goldman arguing, in a post on Danielle Allen's Our Declaration (2014), that you can't really comprehend the meaning of the Declaration of Independence unless you believe in God:
Can you agree with the Declaration of Independence if you don’t believe in God? .... On the level of intention, the Declaration presumes a personal and providential deity.
...while people can accept the Declaration’s claims about rights for secular reasons, I suspect that those who take its religious elements seriously are more likely to act in the ways necessary to secure them. This is important because the Declaration is not, as Allen claims, “a philosophical argument”. Instead, it is a call to arms. People generally don’t fight for “commitments” and “grounds”. For better or for worse, they do fight for what they believe God demands...I'm running most of my own comments here, with a little continuity, because it's my blog so I can do it if I want, and to take the opportunity to edit some. You should totally look at the whole exchange, though, which covers an enormous range of topics, and contributions, as always happens there, at a very high level along with some idiocy.
06.18.15 at 11:05 pm
Sorry, isn’t the expression “nature’s God” explicitly deist? A reference to the purely impersonal source of post-Lockean natural law, the magical thing revealed when “God said, let Newton be, and there was light”? In the “vast chain of being which from God began”. Wikipedia assumes so, for what it’s worth, without seeing a need to argue about it.
The expression certainly comes from Pope’s Essay on Man, but Dr. Google thinks Jefferson’s use of it is derived from the most notorious of deists, Lord Bolingbroke, in his Letter to Pope (it used to be thought that Pope got it from Bolingbroke, but it now appears to be the other way around) or a quotation of Bolingbroke in a commonplace book.
Slave to no sect, who takes no private road,Bolingbroke's Letter to Pope reduces:
But looks through Nature up to Nature’s God;
Pursues that chain which links the immense design,
Joins heaven and earth, and mortal and divine;
Sees, that no being any bliss can know,
But touches some above, and some below;
Learns, from this union of the rising whole,
The first, last purpose of the human soul;
And knows, where faith, law, morals, all began,
All end, in love of God, and love of man.
It is the modest, not the presumptuous, inquirer who makes a real and safe progress in the discovery of divine truths. One follows Nature and Nature's God; that is, he follows God in his works and in his word.It should be noted that no educated person in the 18th century was a biblical literalist or believed that God had dictated the Old Testament to Moses, and so on, as many Texans do today; but theist and deist alike could accept the idea of Scripture as an aspect of divine creation, something that proceeded from creation, or the Principle. What Bolingbroke meant by "his word" is apparently those bits of the Bible that are entirely "plain", unambiguous, and unmystical, reducing the theological apparatus to pure ethical code, amplified in a later philosophical essay:
some men are impudent enough to pretend, others are silly enough to believe, that they adhere to the gospel, and maintain the cause of God against infidels and heretics, when they do nothing better, nor more, than espouse the conceits of men, whom enthusiasm, or the ambition of forming sects, or of making a great figure in them, has inspired. If you ask now what the practice of the christian fathers, and of other divines, should have been, in order to preserve the purity of faith, and to promote peace and charity, the answer is obvious... They should have adhered to the word of God: they should have paid no regard to heathen philosophy, jewish cabala, the sallies of enthusiasm, or the refinements of human ingenuity: they should have embraced, and held fast the articles of faith and doctrine, that were delivered in plain terms, or in unequivocal figures: they should not have been dogmatical where the sense was doubtful, nor have presumed even to guess where the Holy Ghost left the veil of mystery undrawn.
In other words, he's thinking of a deist Scripture, exactly like the one Jefferson famously prepared, with all the religious bits cut out.
06.19.15 at 3:02 pm
...Several commenters disagreed with my interpretation because Jefferson and probably Franklin were deists. That’s true, and has to be taken into account. But in my view it doesn’t exhaust the meaning of the Declaration. That’s because I agree with Allen that the Declaration has to be read as a work of collective writing, rather than expression of one or a few author’s intention. The document that emerged from the process of drafting, revision, and debate is clearly more theistic than Jefferson’s original draft. By pointing this out, I think I’m adhering to Allen’s hermeneutic principle more rigorously than does in the book.
It’s also worth remembering that Jefferson’s deism was somewhat unusual, even by the standards of his collaborators. Franklin may have shared something Jefferson’s naturalism, but he took a utilitarian view of religion’s social function. Adams had doubts about miracles, but was basically a liberal congregationalist. Roger Sherman was an orthodox calvinist. I know little about Robert Livingston, but believe him to have been a fairly relaxed Anglican.
The bottom line is that this was not a group likely to base its argument on Enlightenment natural religion. And that’s just the committee of five–the continental congress included many conventional believers and few serious churchmen, such as John Witherspoon, who would not have signed if they thought the Declaration was in any way contrary to Christianity.
06.19.15 at 3:35 pm
SG @ 67: For my part I did not mean to disagree with your interpretation “because Jefferson and Franklin were deists” but because the text of the Declaration is deist, referring in precise language from the 1730s to an intentionless god from whom nature and natural law simply flow, not particularly different philosophically from the concept we now have of the Big Bang.
06.19.15 at 3:43 pm
yastreblyansky @74 That is possibly true of the language in the first sentence. I don’t think it’s true of natural rights passage (although we perhaps could argue about what “Creator” means). I’m pretty sure that isn’t for the references to the “Supreme Judge” and “Divine Providence”. My interpretation is based on the assumption (which I share with Allen) that these statements, which were added by groups including more conventionally religious members, have to be taken into consideration. Again, I don’t think the likes of Adams, Sherman, or Witherspoon would have signed on if it were *just* deism.
There’s also an important distinction to be made between deism–“an intentionless god from whom nature and natural law simply flow”–and natural theism, which involves an intentional creator, but excludes miracles, revelation, etc. The Declaration is clearly compatible with natural theism, which was a popular and pretty respectable view in the 18th century. Outright deism was another matter…
Also, Adams was not a “liberal congregationalist” but a radical Unitarian, who thought of God in deistic terms as a “great Principle” and found the concept of the Incarnation disgusting, an “awful blasphemy”, as he wrote to Jefferson in January 1825:
The Europeans are all deeply tainted with prejudices, both ecclesiastical and temporal, which they can never get rid of. They are all infected with episcopal and presbyterian creeds, and confessions of faith. They all believe that great Principle which has produced this boundless universe, Newton’s universe and Herschell’s universe, came down to this little ball, to be spit upon by Jews [that’s the Europeans’ prejudice-tainted view, not Adams’s]. And until this awful blasphemy is got rid of, there never will be any liberal science in the world.
06.19.15 at 3:49 pm
Sure, the Declaration is compatible with natural theism and indeed is meant, I’m sure, to be compatible with any religion, but I thought you were arguing that it requires some theistic belief.
06.19.15 at 4:29 pm
@84 @89, Be careful about jumping ahead 50 tumultuous years. Adams’ views in the 1820s were not the same as in the 1770s. He was more orthodox as a younger man.
That said, the difference is not as sharp as one might think. New England Unitariansm developed out of “liberal” Congregationalism, which was technically a theory of church government rather than a theology. Although they rejected Calvinist doctrines of total depravity and predestination, as well as the incarnation, New England Unitarians contributed to believe in an intentional creator, moral world order, and general providence. And these are the kind of views I’ve associated with the Declaration.
06.19.15 at 5:18 pm
@87 Not clear to me whether Adams was more seriously orthodox in his forties than his seventies or perhaps just felt freer to be open when he retired to private life. He was anxious as he and Jefferson remade their friendship to insist that that famous statement made to the Massachusetts Militia in 1798 ( when he was 63, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people”) was meant to have the broadest interpretation including atheists, as he wrote in 1813:
Who composed that Army of fine young Fellows that was then before my Eyes? There were among them, Roman Catholicks, English Episcopalians, Scotch and American Presbyterians, Methodists, Moravians, Anababtists, German Lutherans, German Calvinists Universalists, Arians, Priestleyans, Socinians, Independents, Congregationalists, Horse Protestants and House Protestants, Deists and Atheists; and “Protestans qui ne croyent rien.” Very few however of several of these Species. Nevertheless all Educated in the GENERAL PRINCIPLES of Christianity: and the general Principles of English and American Liberty.
Surely he and Franklin stuck in that “endowed by their creator” to broaden the appeal of the document in the same way, not to change its meaning (and to improve the clunky sound of “from that equal creation”, which was a good decision from a stylistic point of view; some kind of “creator” is already implied in the passive of “are created” in the previous clause, but it still doesn’t need to be personal or intentional).
I didn't get around to Goldman's other point, on the Committee of Five and the references to "divine providence" and the "supreme judge of the world", until the end, but got sidetracked into a really annoying discussion on whether (white) Christianity was the fons et origo of the anti-slavery movement in the 18th century.
06.19.15 at 3:53 pm
Protestant reformers, such as that famous born-again Christian crank: William Wilberforce and his allies in Christ managed to accomplish something no enlightenment philosopher ever managed to do: end slavery. The abolition movement in the US is the story of Christians, mostly Protestants, risking life and limb to bring religion to slaves, and then use religion to bring slaves to freedom. This work was not done by American Atheists. How about some non-Christian cranks? Gandhi, for example. Good thing he’s not around to cause trouble, but that other notorious defender of opponent of freedom: the Dahlia Lama [sic!!!] still is....
My own limited understanding is that Christian apologies for the trans-Atlantic slave trade entered the public domain as a response, in kind, to attacks on the slave trade by Christian abolitionists, attacks which began in earnest after 1700. These took the form of pamphlets. The absence of any/many pre-1800 depictions of slavery suggests to me that very few people say any reason to produce the images. There are images, I believe of Christians taken as slaves in north Africa, and of Christians taken as slaves by North American Indians. There was an enormous market for captivity narratives, such as Mary Rowlandson’s, one early edition featured illustrations....
06.19.15 at 4:41 pm
kidneystones @ 83: That great 17th-century theologian of free will John Milton, for one, accepted the idea that black Africans were “natural slaves” and the fate of Ham,
…the irreverent son
Of him who built the ark ; who, for the shame
Done to his Father, heard this heavy curse,
Servant of servants, on his vicious Race.
I think the idea that Christians ran the anti-slavery movement in the 18th century has to be based on a foolishly anglocentric view: Surely it belonged more to the Enlightenment than the church, in nontheological packaging from Scotland and the ideas of the decidedly non-Christian anti-slavery campaigners Voltaire and Rousseau before it Bishop Wilberforce took it up.
06.19.15 at 5:10 pm
@88 Thx for this. Got to go, but your post deserves a response. Yes, the fate of Ham is the passage that pops up most frequently in my readings of Christian apologists. You’re free to hold your own views. I’m not aware that Voltaire, or Rousseau, ever campaigned for anything, although I claim no expertise on either individual.
I do know something of the French 18th century abolition movement, which was very feeble. The 18th century was the boom period for the French slave trade. Indeed, the demand for slaves in Saint-Domingue played a key role in the revolt there. The abolition movement of the 18th century did not gain much traction anywhere until very late. Abbe Gregoire led the fight before and during the revolution, but even after the ban on slavery was basically forced upon Robespierre, much of the abolitionist literature distributed in France was produced in Britain, translated, and shipped into France. The ban on slavery in France did not last a decade and was restored by Napoleon in 1802, I think, with no substantial objection from anyone. Britain imposed a ban on the French slave trade in 1815, as part of the peace treaty after Waterloo, demanding the French end the slave trade within five years. The French regarded this as an act of economic aggression, which it was, whatever else it might have been, and so did very little to comply. Very soon, however, France joined Britain in recognizing that it would be far more economical to simply leave Africans in place and enslave the entire continent. The idea caught on and we’re all living with the consequences of that project today.
My own understanding is that Montesquieu provided the philosophical underpinnings for the French 18th century anti-slavery movement, such as it was, but you may well be right about Rousseau and Voltaire. In terms of results, nothing much changed until Wilberforce and company succeeded. The British popular press treated the abolitionists very cruelly.
Expanding just a little on the Milton quote, which kidneystones doesn't get: I'm not quoting it as if to show my familiarity with the Ham legend from Genesis and its use by pro-slavery Christians, which I'd have thought is pretty well known to everybody, but that it was Milton doing it, one of the most radically republican Puritan thinkers of the 17th century, an apostle of political freedom and a fierce member of the reformed church, yet he didn't object to African slavery in the least.
06.19.15 at 8:16 pm
@93 Aren’t you moving the goal posts a little? I was responding to your suggestion that opposition to slavery originated as “attacks on the slave trade by Christian abolitionists, attacks which began in earnest after 1700. These took the form of pamphlets.” But as far as I can tell English antislavery pamphlets began in the 1780s with the freethinker Thomas Cooper (later, alas, a South Carolina slavery and nullification advocate), whereas Montesquieu (you're right, he started it) denounced slavery in the 1748 L’esprit des lois and Diderot in the 1765 Encyclopédie.
The earliest Christian anti-slavery organizing, in the later 18th century, appears to have consisted mainly of the very heterodox Quakers, both in Philadelphia and in England (in Philadelphia, though, the atheist Tom Paine was a founding member, and the religiously indifferent Benjamin Franklin eventually became the president). When more conventional Christians like Wilberforce took up the cause–and I’m not denying he was a lot more effective than Condorcet–it was in alliance with the secular utilitarian movement of Jeremy Bentham, which also did a lot of the work.
So it’s not only philosophically wrong to insist on the essential role of Christianity, as Plume @97 shows, it’s also not historically accurate.
I should have mentioned by the way that Napoleon was a counterrevolutionary and a military dictator, so it's not surprise that he didn't object to slavery and that his subjects didn't object (at least not audibly). And progressive ideas were fundamentally dead in France (except for the brief revolutionary moments of 1830 and 1848) until the 1870s. The French anti-slavery movement failed not because the Revolution didn't pay enough attention to it but because the Revolution itself failed (thanks perhaps to the implacable hostility of the English and Germans and Austrians who forced the country into total militarization in the mid-1790s).
In the exiled French opposition under Napoleon, liberals like Mme de Staël and Benjamin Constant were strong slavery opponents and allied to Wilberforce, though they were no more religious than Jeremy Bentham was, further evidence for the point that while certain Christians and Christian organizations did play an important role in the emancipation, "Christianity" as such had little to do with it; it was, rather, particular Christians under Enlightenment influence while the advocates of slavery were Christians who rejected Enlightenment. Though Wilberforce himself appears to have been deeply conservative, as commenter Plume noted, with respect to most of the political issues of the day, interested only in the sufferers overseas while ignoring the miseries of the working and unemployed class in his own country, like Dickens's Mrs. Jellyby.
A much more important point than these quibbles was raised by Plume, who notes that the whole discussion tends to downplay the agency of the enslaved persons themselves to tell the story of how the white people saved themselves from being slaveholders, in a way that was obsolete, or ought to have been, some decades ago. My contributions to the thread deserve some criticism on that head.
06.20.15 at 3:16 am
If I could add one last note on theological language in the Declaration, because I’ve just learned something from a 2002 conference paper by Jeffry Morrison and a useful (though wingnut-sponsored) online breakdown of the drafting process, about the peroration to the work (@22):
The interpolations of “supreme judge of the world” and “divine providence” were not part of the initial editing work by Adams and Franklin (unlike “endowed by their creator”); they were added by the Committee of Five of Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin plus Roger Sherman and Robert Livingston, the former (as Sam Goldman points out @67) a devout Calvinist.
Morrison finds that the two phrases are not just more theistic/less deistic than the language of the introduction, but downright seriously and exclusively Calvinist, with a particularly New England Puritan resonance: “supreme judge of the world” is repeatedly used in Jonathan Edwards’s second most famous sermon, on the Last Judgment, and “divine providence” a favorite of none other than Dr. John Witherspoon, president of Princeton, member of the Continental Congress, and the only clergyman to sign the document, who preached a sermon on divine providence at Princeton in May 1776, just a few weeks before the Congress got moving. An oral tradition says that Witherspoon specifically asked Congress to use the expression. (“Providence” is also an Enlightened term for an impersonal divinity, but Morrison notes that “it was common practice for “Awakened” pastors to use what would today be considered deistic language to refer to God”.)
Anyhow, Morrison concludes that the phrases
would have struck Reformed Americans as simply good Calvinist faith in practice, and rallied their support for the cause of independence; which, in the event, they gave. It was in this way that the Second Continental Congress made strategic (though not necessarily impious) use of what can be called political theology in its Declaration of Independence.
while he agrees that the “creator” phrases at the beginning equally express deism.
It’s thus pretty clear that the religious references of the Declaration were so many dog-whistles, meant to reassure the untheological majority in the Congress (which would possibly not have understood the Puritanism of “divine providence” or “supreme judge”, a phrase associated with semi-deist Locke) and the Calvinist population of New England (which would similarly fail to see anything weird about “nature’s god”) that nobody’s religious or irreligious sentiments were being disrespected on the full range from Puritan to atheist. But properly understood the final sausage has an unresolvable theological contradiction and shouldn’t be understood as making a theological point at all. The point is political and about the accommodation (unlike in wicked England with its established church) of all views, including disbelief.
I note Sam Goldman advertises himself as a “vaguely Straussian conservative”, suggesting to my way of thinking that his idea of the community’s need for a faith in God to make them behave properly is advocating one of those “noble lies” of which Strauss is often accused, and that the argument for a theological content without which the Declaration cannot be understood (in fact you can only understand it by ignoring the theological content, since it’s contradictory) is itself a kind of Straussian deception; it’s not true, but it ought to be so that it will perform its function of facilitating social control. This is the very opposite of what the Declaration ought to mean.
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