Peter Marshall, Christian Nationalist
Jonathan Rowe on Jun 27th 2008
Previously I discussed the Reverend Peter Marshall’s work here. Rev. Marshall is a fairly big figure in “Christian America” circles. From what I know of his work, it’s pretty shoddy. He wrote a classic in that idiom entitled “The Light and the Glory.” Here is how Dr. Gregg Frazer describes that work in his PhD thesis from Claremont Graduate University:
It became the classic text of that camp. Its historiography is abominable; it is a collection of speculations, suppositions, personal musings, and “insights” with little or no proof or documentation for extraordinary claims. p. 38.
In my earlier post, I noted Marshall, and his coauthor David Manuel are working on a revised version of this book, to be published sometime in 2009. Somewhat to their credit, they are attempting to improve their level of scholarship. Relying on Peter Lillback’s work on George Washington, Marshall notes they will no longer endorse George Washington’s spurious “Daily Sacrifice” Prayerbook (of which by the way Pat Robertson’s CBN apparently endorses the validity).
Good for them, but apparently you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. The year is 2008, 8 years after David Barton wrote his article, “Unconfirmed Quotations,” cautioning his followers to no longer spread these bogus utterance of America’s Founders, and Marshall still features the following on his website:
For example, Patrick Henry, a great Founding Father, and one of the strongest evangelical Christians of his time, said that “It can not be too often repeated, or too strongly emphasized that America was not founded by religionists nor on any religion, but by Christians on the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” This is a statement that never shows up in the history books that are read by the vast majority of American schoolchildren.
You don’t see it in the schoolbooks because Patrick Henry never uttered it. And it’s not as though Marshall is unfamiliar with Barton or Wallbuilders. Indeed, they recently did a series together still showing on TBN entitled “Under God,” which from the episodes I have seen repeated all of the Christian Nationalist revisionist talking points.
But, for all I know, given that I’ve never read “The Light and the Glory,” which was originally published in 1977, before Barton made his mark, it could be the source of some of Barton’s “unconfirmed quotations.”
One reason why these “unconfirmed quotations” don’t seem to die is that they sound so on point. When Christian Nationalists look for quotations to support their claim, those are the ones that first stand out. But they represent neither what the Founders said, nor what they stood for. Most of the accurate quotations that Christian Nationalists then offer distort their context or meaning. For instance, Marshall offers what follows from John Adams in misleading or misunderstood context:
John Adams, our second President and a true son of the Puritans, spoke for all the Founding Fathers when he spoke these words to the Massachusetts Militia in 1798: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Marshall fails to note that Adams was a fervent theological unitarian who in his private letters uttered blasphemous sentiments on the Trinity for which his Puritan ancestors would have executed him (literally, they had laws on the books demanding the death penalty for such “high handed blasphemie”).
Further, when Adams stated “religion” and “morality” he meant exactly what he said: “religion” in general, not “Christianity” — certainly not orthodox Trinitarian Christianity in which Adams didn’t believe and whose doctrines he often bitterly mocked — in particular. Marshall and the “Christian Nation” crowd make the error of reading not just “Christianity” but “orthodox” or what they would regard as “true biblical Christianity” into Adams’ generic endorsement of “religion” as a source for public “morality.” What follows is one of many of Adams’ quotations that show when he said “religion” in a generic sense, he meant “religion” not necessarily “Christianity”:
It has pleased the Providence of the first Cause, the Universal Cause, that Abraham should give religion not only to Hebrews but to Christians and Mahomitans, the greatest part of the modern civilized world.
– John Adams to M.M. Noah, July 31, 1818.
Even when John Adams praised “Christianity” in particular, it was done through the lens of his heterodox unitarian creed, and resulted in sentiments that evangelicals like Marshall would consider “heresy” and not “real Christianity” at all, if they truly understood or honestly dealt with what Adams and the other key Founders really posited. The following is one of John Adams’ quotations the Christian America crowd often spreads, which, again, on the surface sounds like it supports their claim, but whose context belies it:
The general Principles, on which the Fathers Atchieved Independence, were…the general Principles of Christianity, in which all those Sects were united: And the general Principles of English and American Liberty, in which all those young Men United, and which had United all Parties in America, in Majorities sufficient to assert and maintain her Independence.
– John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, June 28th, 1813
Now, if one didn’t understand the context one might think Adams were referring to those principles in the creeds that united the orthodox Churches, what evangelicals and Roman Catholics consider “real Christianity.” Things like original sin, the trinity, incarnation, atonement, infallibility of the Bible. But you would be wrong. Adams explains just who is included in that “lowest-common-denominator” of “general principles of Christianity,” in the rest of his letter that the Christian America crowd doesn’t reveal:
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 ["Protestants who believe nothing"].” 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.
Not only Universalists who denied eternal damnation but Arians, Socinians and Priestleyans [the later term referring to Adams', Jefferson's, and Franklin's religious mentor, British Unitarian Whig Joseph Priestley] all of whom were unitarians, denying the Trinity and other fundamental doctrines of orthodoxy. But it gets worse! Deists, Atheists, and Protestants who believe nothing are likewise included in Adams’ lowest common denominator of “Christian principles.”
And to make matters even worse, Adams appeals to the authority of some radically anti-Christian Enlightenment philosophers:
In favour of these general Principles in Phylosophy, Religion and Government, I could fill Sheets of quotations from Frederick of Prussia, from Hume, Gibbon, Bolingbroke, Reausseau and Voltaire, as well as Neuton and Locke: not to mention thousands of Divines and Philosophers of inferiour Fame.
Whatever theological system Adams was referring to, it’s certainly not what Peter Marshall, David Barton and the rest of the “Christian America” crowd would consider “real Christianity.”
Filed in The Belfry, The Bureau
For some reason when I think of Peter Marshall I think of the game show host.
Jonathan,
Great post. I’m often disappointed by the prejudice, towards others liberty, that many self proclaimed (sic) historians display and project upon the founders and framers of our nation.
While it is disappointing the see, hear, or read opinions that associate our nation’s founders with (what I find to be) debasing characteristics, it is a pleasure to read a testament that is constructed upon historical evidence and seeks an understanding of their intentions that is congruent with the evidence.
Thanks
In defense of Barton, who after all was a high school teacher with no background in history when he started his inquiry, the false quotes attributed to various Founders were generated in the hagiographic 19th century. He did not personally fabricate them.
After Barton rediscovered them, they spread like wildfire, in no small part due to the internet. It’s to his credit that he’s gone back with a more exacting scalpel.
Moreover, as I poke through the internet, I find that many of the criticisms of Barton’s main thesis are as shoddy as his own original flawed work. To wit:
In fact, Steve Weissman in his Truthout article America’s Religious Right - Saints or Subversives? said that “Barton systematically fails to see that many, if not most, of the founders were men of the 17th and 18th Century Enlightenment, who consciously rejected any literal interpretation of the Bible. To the degree they had religious faith, and many did, they believed in a God who - like a cosmic watchmaker - created the world and its natural laws, and then played no further part.”
This is pure nonsense, and just the sort of thing that Barton was reacting to, the contemporary propaganda that the US was founded in a secular vacuum.
Thomas Jefferson himself—the least religiously orthodox of all the Founders—believed that America would be punished by a just, intervening God for slavery:
“And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference!” —Notes on the State of Virginia, 1785
You don’t have to go far to dig this out. Some of these words appear on the Jefferson Memorial itself.
The irony of all this is that some people swallow stuff like Weissman’s nonsense as easily as Barton’s supporters swallowed his, yet think of themselves as Enlightened and educated, unlike those Christian fools.
It is to laugh. Truth is always more complicated than that.
Thanks Ben. And great points Tom, especially: “[T]he false quotes attributed to various Founders were generated in the hagiographic 19th century. He did not personally fabricate them.”
This is something that ought to be appreciated (as well as your other main point about the secular left being wrong about most if not all of the Founders being Deists).
The 19th Century had a bias not unlike our “Political Correctness” today, towards the Christian America social myth. It’s fascinating to look back at cultural prejudices of a bygone era. I predict in 200 years some of the politically correct issues that we have to tiptoe around will also be a relic. Likewise on some of these taboo issues often it’s tough to really get a hold of what someone really believed by just studying their public writings (and as Strauss teaches, it helps to look for “esoteric” clues in them) but have to examine their private writings.
Denying the Trinity and all of these heterodox sentiments I’ve traced to our Founders were issues that publicly, even Jefferson, couldn’t be up front about. Thomas Paine was and was likewise socially ruined for it.
Heheh, Jon.
I don’t agree with a word in the article, but anytime you get Ben Franklin, Leo Strauss and Christopher Hitchens all in the same place, it’s worth a look.
Google “Jefferson” with “deist,” and you’ll get a zillion hits. It’s “common knowledge” that he was a deist, although we’ve just shown that he wasn’t.
Apparently the Christian Nation crowd isn’t alone in its delusions.
Now do the same google with Franklin and you’ll get hundreds of citations from Chapter 6 of Franklin’s Autobiography:
“I soon became a thorough Deist.”
and off they go. Missing from almost all of them is what Franklin writes only several lines later!
“[I] began to suspect that this Doctrine tho’ it might be true, was not very useful.”
Franklin continues,
“…Revelation had indeed no weight with me, as such; but I entertain’d an opinion that, though certain actions might not be bad because they were forbidden by it, or good because it commanded them, yet probably these actions might be forbidden because they were bad for us, or commanded because they were beneficial to us, in their own natures, all the circumstances of things considered. And this persuasion, with the kind hand of Providence, or some guardian angel, or accidental favorable circumstances and situations, or all together, preserved me, thro’ this dangerous time of youth, and the hazardous situations I was sometimes in among strangers, remote from the eye and advice of my father, without any willful gross immorality or injustice, that might have been expected from my want of religion.”
Not an orthodox Christian, then, certainly. But no “deist” either, and I do believe that as much as I admire and enjoy Hitchens and Strauss, their method doesn’t apply to Benjamin Franklin. As for the thousands of erroneous assertions of Jefferson’s and Franklin’s deism on the internet, as with some of David Barton’s work, we see that getting at the truth is very hard work whereas ignorance is highly contagious.
It might be said that Franklin was fairly typical of many or most Americans then and now, with a healthy suspicion that there is a God after all, one that looks in on us at least now and then, and that even if the Bible holds no truth, it holds a helluva lot of wisdom, and we cross it at our own peril.
[...] my last post on Peter Marshall, coauthor of “The Light and the Glory,” John Fea informs me of his article on the 30th [...]
Tom Van Dyke,
David Barton did not “rediscover” 19th century fabrications and haphazardly pass them on. He was on a Christian Reconstructionist mission to subvert the truth. Historical accuracy was not a concern. You pretend his falsehoods magically spread like wildfire. But he formed Wallbuilders with the intent of spreading them like wildfire. His motivation was nefarious. He got caught like a criminal hoping for the perfect crime. And in a way he did commit that perfect crime because a lot of Christians would rather believe in the purity of his myths.
I’m guessing your misrepresentations of Jefferson might explain why you defend such a man. You did stumble over one true thing: that Deism is not any easier to categorize than Christianity. Not all Deists believed God was forever removed from human affairs. They did tend to believe God did not work through supernatural events. They tended to put their faith in the power of reason rather than prayer. But since they claimed no Holy Word, no church of their own, no written tenets of any sort, and no standardized definition of what their faith was, it’s outrageous for you to point to one alleged heterodox position and claim it proves Jefferson was no Deist. It’s certainly easier to find he had heterodox positions when it came to Christianity. Are you actually going to claim he was a Christian? If so why? How can a man who rejects the Bible as scripture, who rejects Jesus as savior and son of God, ever to be considered a Christian?
You state that Jefferson “believed that America would be punished by a just, intervening God for slavery.” To support this you offer his Notes on the State of Virginia, Query 18. But let’s look carefully at those words. Does he really expect God to intervene? No, he does not.
Jefferson begins by claiming slavery is bad for general morality and industry, meaning the work ethic. Then he adds: “And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath?” Jefferson chooses his words carefully. He does not say he believes that once the slave’s liberty is violated, God’s wrath is bound to rain down. He asks how liberty can be secure if people stop *believing* in the wrath of such a God. He does not imply destruction by way of God’s supernatural imposition. He implies the people will take liberty away from themselves once they stop *believing* in its sacred and universal nature. As a confessed neocon you should understand this “esoteric” text.
Jefferson continues, “Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect” (that is, ponder or contemplate) “that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events” (that is, contemplating that if a Newtonian-like moral universe is self-correcting through something like karma or natural laws with real cause and effect, wrongs are bound to catch up with us) “that it may become probable by supernatural interference!” And note the words “may become.” This is more than a hedge. It’s a maybe. It’s a contemplative maybe. It’s a dreamer’s maybe. It’s certainly not an expectation. It’s not even a definitive warning. The exclamation point should hint that this is hyperbole. This is made clear when Jefferson interrupts, slapping us back to reality: ” — But it is impossible to be temperate and to pursue this subject through the various considerations of policy, of morals, of history natural and civil.” In other words, he is apologizing for his outburst, his intemperance, his lack of moderation in discussing the issue. Like the abortion debate of today, the slavery issue was too hot. It inevitably led away from cool considerations of policy, the turns of history, and effects on manners (the subject of this Query), and turned to irrationality. If there is any doubt that this apology is sincere, he sets us straight: “We must be contented to hope they” (that is, practical considerations) “will force their way into every one’s mind.” So Jefferson, far from expecting a supernatural intervention, knows the only hope for a resolution is with man — that one day men will realize it is in their interest to abolish slavery.
I think it’s clear that this text is in line with Deist thought. It certainly does not contradict it. Your Ben Franklin quotes are an even worse example of wishful thinking. They show no Christian sentiment. They do not contradict Deist thinking at all.