Understanding the role of faith and religion in the founding of the United States

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To mark the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Virginia Commonwealth University history professors have been spotlighting America's founding ideals and tensions, the era's debates around independence and the story behind the declaration itself. Their insights power "The Legacy of 1776," a webinar series from the Department of History and the College of Humanities and Sciences.

In his installment - "Faith and the Founding of the United States" - Ryan Smith, Ph.D., explored the role of religion in the nation's founding, the diversity of religious groups in the colonies, what the revolutionaries meant by terms such as "Nature's God," and the beliefs of key founders and the documents that shaped both religious freedom and national identity.

VCU News caught up with Smith for perspective on America's religious past and present.

Give us a broad sense of how religion underpinned the revolutionary spirit.

Historians have disagreed about how important the role of religious faith was in driving the revolutionaries' cause. Some point to a set of earlier religious revivals, known as the Great Awakening, that offered some common experiences across different colonies and set the stage for challenging established authorities.

But even for those historians who do not see religion as a direct factor in the break for independence, it is impossible to miss all the references to God in the Declaration of Independence, in the proclamations of the Continental Congress and in the words of the key founders that supported or justified the movement.

We can see those factors in the response to the Quebec Act, which added fuel to the revolutionaries' fire when it was passed by the British Parliament in 1774. That act gave support to French-speaking Catholics in Canada, aiding what many New Englanders saw as their religious enemy at their back door. The rebels lumped that act in with the Intolerable Acts during that season of unrest.

And Thomas Paine based much of his argument in his influential 1776 pamphlet, "Common Sense," on religious grounds, making the case that God did not intend for people to be governed by kings.

Was there much religious diversity in the colonies?

In the Colonial era leading up to the Revolution, church and state were intertwined. For most of the British colonies, that meant that the Church of England ran things, with more or less "tolerance" for other forms of Christianity. New England was a bit different because the Puritan-based Congregationalists ran things at the local level there.

But even within that framework, the colonies hosted a very wide range of Christian groups with radically different practices and beliefs - from Baptists in Rhode Island, to Quakers and Moravians in Pennsylvania, and even a few Catholic congregations here and there, among many others.

Today, such a landscape may sound like just different flavors of the same Christianity, but the colonists saw huge differences among them, making this set of colonies far more religiously diverse than most places in Europe. There were also thriving Jewish congregations in several seaports on the eve of the Revolution, and their leaders participated in the independence movement.

Of course, beyond these groups there was even more religious diversity, considering the many Native American and African faith traditions that were practiced by those populations among the colonists.

Through today's lens, what might surprise us about faith or religion during the Colonial era?

One surprising thing to many modern Americans is how difficult it was at that time to be an official member of these churches. Puritan, Presbyterian and Baptist churches did not just take anyone, and they ran strict discipline to kick out members whom they thought were making trouble. Being an official member, not just an occasional attendee, made a big difference.

Another surprising thing might be how lax many of the Church of England parishes could be. Although everyone in those parishes was technically required to attend services there, many regularly skipped worship - and in some swaths of the backcountry, there were hardly any churches at all. And there were lots of folk practices, like charms or hexes or astrology, that were practiced alongside Christian beliefs.

What about faith among America's founding leaders and documents?

This is the question that most excites public debate today. Was Thomas Jefferson a deist? Did George Washington pray at Valley Forge? Did founders like John Adams or Alexander Hamilton consider the new United States a "Christian nation"?

It is clear that the founders took these issues very seriously, both in their own lives and in how they expected them to play out in the new federal government. But it is difficult to put these individuals into fixed boxes.

Many, including Jefferson, Washington, Adams and Benjamin Franklin, did not share some of their churches' core beliefs. We see some of this hedging and creativity in the language of documents like the Declaration of Independence, which refers to "Nature's God" as well as "the Supreme Judge of the world" and "divine Providence," with each title being different in a way.

It was difficult for all the representatives to bridge their religious differences. Washington made particularly strenuous efforts to do so, reaching out to signal welcome to Catholics, Jews, and others. We see the result of all that in the first words of the U.S. Constitution, invoking "We the people" rather than a deity.

The founders tended to see established religion as a question for individual states to decide, rather than the federal government. Though James Madison famously worried about the negative effects that any kind of religious/political connection would have on people's faith.

What else should we know?

We can easily see the urgency of these questions in today's political landscape. The recent moves by the Supreme Court, the Trump administration and the speaker of the House have made the founders' beliefs and their legacies more relevant than ever. Our students, faculty and community all have an important role to play in building a solid basis for entering these debates.