Religion and the Founding of the United States: An Interview with Thomas Kidd
- Religion and the Founding of the United States:An Interview with Thomas Kidd
Thomas Kidd is associate professor of history and co-director of the Program on Historical Studies of Religion, Institute for Studies of Religion, at Baylor University. He is the author of a variety of books on colonial America, including The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America (Yale University Press, 2007); The Great Awakening: A Brief History with Documents (Bedford Books, 2007); American Christians and Islam: Evangelical Culture and Muslims from the Colonial Period to the Age of Terrorism (Princeton University Press, 2008); and, most recently, God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution (Basic Books, 2010). Historically Speaking editor Randall Stephens spoke to Kidd about Religion and the American Revolution.
How did religion influence the thinking of the Founding Fathers?
Many of the founders believed in Providence. God worked through history; He worked through nations. Jefferson, Franklin, Washington, and others believed that God or Providence, depending on what term you prefer, was doing something important through the creation of America. I see Providence as the most problematic religious value of the Revolution. A belief in Providence can unify people. We can see that today, as well as during the time of the American Revolution. But it can also obscure important moral and ethical questions about war. And it did that during the Revolution, especially when it came to campaigns against Native Americans. A particularly vicious campaign in 1779 against the Iroquois resulted in the destruction of forty Indian towns—total destruction. An uncritical belief in the Providential destiny of America provided justification for atrocious violence.
Were there dissenters who said, "This isn't really what we think God would want"?
Yes. The key dissenters were loyalists, who didn't believe that God was behind the American Revolution. And some Native American evangelicals followed the lead of Samson Occom, the key evangelical Native American pastor, who advised staying out of the war. Occom thought that the war would be very harmful for the progress of the gospel. In fact, most of the Indian mission stations were broken up during the war.
The Revolution and the creation of the United States are so often seen as Enlightenment events, products of rationalism and deism. Yet you argue in your book that evangelicals played a major role in fostering such American ideals as religious liberty. Could you speak to that?
Evangelicals and deists had a common cause when it came to religious liberty. Jefferson won wide support from evangelical Baptists, especially in Virginia, because they saw him as a champion of religious freedom. And in the pre-Revolutionary period Madison and Jefferson honed their views on religious liberty not by reading Enlightenment texts on the subject but by watching the colony of Virginia persecute evangelicals, especially Baptists. As late as the early 1770s Baptists preachers were being fined and put in jail in Virginia for illegal preaching. Madison wrote to friends in the North asking them to pray that Virginians could move beyond this vicious persecution. Religious liberty resonated with someone like Jefferson not only because of his concerns about the treatment of the Baptists, but also because he knew that if the state could persecute a Baptist, then they were likely to come for him next on account of the radical nature of his own personal theology.
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A detail from "The First Prayer in Congress," painted by T.H. Matteson; engraved on steel by H.S. Sadd, ca. 1848. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-DIG-pga-03229].
Were Jefferson and his Baptist supporters on opposite ends of the spectrum in a way?
In terms of personal theology—and I make a strong distinction between personal beliefs and public religious values in my book—they were on opposite ends of the sprectrum. But they were united on the public value of religious liberty.
What did Jefferson think about the Baptists' personal theology?
He thought that Baptists were fanatics. And late in his life Jefferson became much more articulate...
