Economy of Faith

Frank Lambert. The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. 344pp. Notes and index. $29.99.

In his most recent book on religion in early America, Frank Lambert contends that a "cultural war" is now raging over the historical relationship between church and state. On one side of the conflict are the "separationists"; on the other side are the "accommodationists." The separationists, writes Lambert, posit an unbridgeable partition between private life and public life, whereas the accommodationists insist that faith should occupy a central place in the nation's civic institutions. In their effort to gain advantage over the other, he argues, both camps have committed the historian's sin of teleology, ascribing their own perspectives to the nation's founders. The problem with the ascendant accommodationists, in particular, is that they ignore the substantial divide between the Europeans who settled the colonies during the seventeenth century and the Americans who established republican governments at the end of the eighteenth. Failing to distinguish between James Madison and John Winthrop, they suggest that the "Founding Fathers" designed a Christian nation with little or no intention of separating church and state. For their part, liberal separationists have relied so heavily upon Jefferson's metaphorical "wall of separation" and given such a priority to private life that they have neglected the moral significance that the Founders accorded to religious instruction and values.

Lambert suggests that we trade these presentist interpretations for an historical understanding of the context within which the Constitution and the First Amendment were written and ratified. We are heirs, he concludes, to a "dual religious heritage"—both the uncompromising faith of the "Planting Fathers" and the libertarian ideals of the Founding Founders (pp. 295, 8). These two distinct but complementary traditions have enriched one another throughout American history. The vigorous religious faith of the Planting Fathers has prospered, Lambert contends, largely because the Founding Fathers bestowed their imprimatur upon "the emerging free marketplace of religion" (p. 8). Eschewing the system of religious regulation that their ancestors had maintained, the Founders attached an enduring ideological justification to an already widespread practice. In effect, they turned the traditional ideal of the "chosen few" on its head, sanctifying what Lambert might have called the "many choosing."

Frank Lambert's name will be familiar to historians of early America and American religious history. He is the author of two important monographs on the mid-eighteenth-century religious revivals that historians call the First Great Awakening. Lambert's influential biography of the Anglican George Whitefield, 'Pedlar in Divinity': George Whitefield and the Transatlantic Revivals, 1739-1771 (1994) revealed how this itinerant preacher borrowed heavily from the techniques practiced in the expanding commercial marketplace. Lambert's second book, Inventing the Great Awakening (1999), convincingly argued that contemporary Americans—and not nineteenth-century historians—developed the interpretive fiction known as "The Great Awakening." Lambert's latest contribution to the field is more ambitious. He has set out to bring early American religious history under a single interpretive umbrella. From all appearances, the admirable intention was to construct a history sufficiently substantive to persuade scholars and sufficiently accessible to edify the general public.

Lambert begins with a concise account of more than a millennia of stormy relations between European states and the established churches. The narrative opens with the Roman Emperor Constantine, who first placed the power of the state in the service of Christianity. Thereafter, kings and popes wrestled for spiritual and temporal authority. As the story shifts to England we learn that papal control had always been tenuous in that island kingdom and broke down completely when Henry VIII established himself as supreme head of the English church in 1534. The restoration of domestic order in the late sixteenth century allowed England to begin its program of overseas expansion. Soon after, a hodge-podge of religious groups—many of them the spiritual descendants of Luther's Reformation—settled in the New World. Whatever their theological and ecclesiastical...