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Reviewed by:
  • Resistance to Tyrants, Obedience to God: Reason, Religion, and Republicanism at the American Founding ed. by Dustin Gish and Daniel Klingboard
  • Steven Gimber
Dustin Gish and Daniel Klingboard, editors. Resistance to Tyrants, Obedience to God: Reason, Religion, and Republicanism at the American Founding (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013). Pp. 260. Index, notes on contributors. Cloth, $85.00.

Resistance to Tyrants, Obedience to God: Reason, Religion, and Republicanism at the American Founding represents a substantial effort to present and explain the importance of “Bible religion” in the United States from the founding of the nation through the antebellum years. It is an interdisciplinary work that showcases the talents of thirteen scholars from at least eight different disciplines. The editors and authors did not undertake this project to discuss the various religious beliefs of the Founders or plumb the depths of their faith, however. The essayists indicate that, regardless of what they may have professed individually, the Founders used the Bible as a guide and reference to shape both their rhetoric and their vision of the nation. In fact, they paired this ancient source with the modern influences of the moderate English Enlightenment. In short, the resulting “creative tension” involved in this balancing act produced remarkable things: a uniquely American political idiom and thought—and the republic itself. [End Page 197]

Following an introductory chapter by editors Dustin Gish and Daniel Klingboard, the contributors’ writings are presented in four groups: “Reason and Faith,” “Biblical Rhetoric and Republicanism,” “Religion and Politics,” and “Legacies.” The first part deals with the foundations—the European Enlightenment—and here Robert Faulkner tackles the influences of Bacon and Locke on the Founders’ approaches to religion; Jonathan Israel presents the radical Enlightenment’s assessment of the American Revolution; and Jeffery Bernstein explores how and why Jefferson’s ideas about religion are similar to those of Spinoza. In their two chapters in the second section, Carla Mulford and Eran Shalev detail the profound impact of the Bible in early American political expression and the editors themselves provide a provocative interpretation of the Pentateuch’s influences in Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia. In the third set, Maura Jane Farrelly demonstrates the role of religion in revolutionary American political affairs through the story of Roman Catholic Charles Carroll of Carrollton’s exertions to get Marylanders to support independence from Britain; Vincent Phillip Muñoz deals with the different understandings of religious freedom of Washington, Jefferson, and Madison; and Peter McNamara explains Alexander Hamilton’s thoughts on religion as a moderating influence to counter the radical Enlightenment’s potential threat to the stability of the new government. In the concluding section of the work, Danilo Petranovich and Matthew Holbreich provide a fascinating analysis of Lincoln’s use of biblical rhetoric and Aristide Tessitore expounds on Tocqueville’s prescient understanding of the influence of both religion and the Enlightenment in America’s founding and in its political culture.

The authors want readers to appreciate the pervasiveness and importance of the Bible and Christianity in American politics. Our Founders were not entirely—or even mostly—guided by the writings of Enlightenment philosophes. Instead they very consciously utilized the Scriptures for direction and inspiration. As important as it is to know and understand this, it does not seem entirely surprising. Regardless of their religious affiliations or beliefs, all our early political luminaries must have grown up listening to parents or elders read or relate Bible stories to them. No doubt the King James Version was the first book they all read. Indeed, the Bible was a common touchstone for the vast majority of Americans in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. And, like anybody else, the Founders relied on that text and other sources for guidance. Then, as now, reason and faith are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The Founders are the same people who edited and [End Page 198] approved the Declaration of Independence, which, in fact, makes mention of two different Gods: the Enlightenment deity—the “Creator” and “Nature’s God”—and the Judeo-Christian God who offers “Protection” and is the “Supreme Judge of the world.” They embraced these contradictory forces and yoked them together to both direct and...

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