The Forgotten Founders on Religion and Public Life

9. Anglican Moderation: Religion and the Political Thought of Edmund Randolph

chapter 9 Anglican Moderation Religion and the Political Thought of Edmund Randolph Kevin R. Hardwick Edmund Randolph (1753–1813), a central actor in Virginia’s revolutionary and constitutional politics from the 1770s to the 1790s, was in many ways a conventional figure. A staunch republican , he celebrated those exemplary Virginians who, he believed ,hadledVirginiathroughtwofoundational,constitutional moments: the first between 1607 and 1624, and the second between 1776 and 1787. For most of his life a devout Episcopalian, Randolph believed there was a direct connection between public virtue and private piety. His appreciation of human character and motivation—indeed, of human psychology—stemmed in logical and unremarkable ways from the theological commitments of the mid-eighteenth-century Church of England. Randolph ’stheologicalliberalism, like thatof manylate-eighteenthcentury Virginians, derived organically from the thought of the mid-seventeenth-centuryCambridgePlatonists,whosepositions became Church of England orthodoxy by the late seventeenth century and provided one important source of ethical thought to the eighteenth-century church. Unlike the Reformed tradition of New England, which from the metropolitan vantage of the 196 eighteenth-centuryBritishempirewasdisturbinglyheterodox(and which faced the usual pressures of colonial societies to conform to the most traditionalformsandvaluesof themetropolitancenter),thecolonialChurch of England consistently viewed itself as an extension of metropolitan values . Even as Randolph decried the injustices of the imperial constitution in the mid-1770s, he, like numerousother Virginians, remained deeply in- fluenced by the understanding of human good inherent in the dominant religion of the empire.1 The colonial Church of England of Randolph’s youth in many ways represented the fruition of its Elizabethan aspirations. As the church historian David L. Holmes has recently noted, Anglican theologians from the late sixteenth century forward “attempted to make the Church of England a middle way—a via media—between Roman Catholicism and Calvinism.” Anglicans criticized Catholicism for adding “too much manmade doctrine to Christianity.” But equally, they believed that Calvinism “subtracted too much that was important.” The result was a conservative and liturgical form of Christian practice that, by the early eighteenth century, easily accommodated the rationalist tendencies of the British Enlightenment. As Holmes correctly emphasizes, the Virginia founders, Randolph among them, remained active members of their parishes, even as some of them followed rationalist critiques of certain church doctrines to become Deists, Socinians, or Unitarians. Most prominent Virginians of Randolph’s generation remained formally aligned with the established church of their childhoods. “They married under its auspices ,” Holmes notes, “consigned their children to its care, and were buried by its clergy.” Their religious and ethical sensibilities, then, developed within the embrace of one of England’s more conservative institutions , even as their faith encompassed some of the more enlightened elements of metropolitan thought.2 Anglican theology diverged most profoundly from that of Calvinism on its assessment of human faculties. Edmund Randolph, like most eighteenth-century thinkers influenced by the Church of England, leaned toward a loosely Pelagian or, perhaps, Arminian understanding of the will. Humanity retained the ability, however imperfect, to make sound moral decisions under the guidance of “right” reason. He was at least implicitly perfectionist in that he believed this crucial human faculty Anglican Moderation | 197 could be improved by self-discipline, sound pedagogy, and emulation of superior role models. Indeed, as we will see, emulation played a critical role in Randolph’s appreciation of how a human society achieved refinement and civility. Because the Anglican tradition rejected the stark Calvinist doctrine of total depravity in favor of a more liberal understanding of human will, it could accommodate the rationalism of British natural science far more easily than could its more fully Reformed competitors.3 By the early eighteenth century, influential Church of England churchmen and philosophers like John Tillotson and John Locke had articulated a particularly Anglican moral vision that to one degree or another characterized Church of England teaching for the rest of the century. For Locke, the “reasonableness of Christianity” was evident. “Reason is natural revelation,” he wrote, “whereby the eternal Father of light, and Fountain of all knowledge, communicates to mankind that portion of the truth which he has laid in reach of their natural faculties.” Men could exercise right reason, even in their natural and unregenerate state, to know God’s law and act accordingly. John Tillotson, whose sermons remained widely popular throughout the British empire until the end of the century, described Christ’s character as that of an ideal gentleman . “The...