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Religion and the Continental Congress, 1774-1789: Contributions to Original Intent, by Derek H. Davis, Oxford University Press, 2000, 288 pp.; $39.95
Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment: Essential Rights and Liberties, by John Witte, Jr., Westview Press, 2000, 224 pp.; $29, paper
America is a nation that was born Christian; indeed, it was born Reformed Protestant, and this suggests that an assertive and intrusive religiosity shaped this nation's political institutions and patterns of social life. Curiously, however, this is a heritage that some Christian authors who work and prosper in elite intellectual circles seem embarrassed by and attempt to mitigate or even, in some instances, effectively deny. More particularly, some—by means of a highly selective historiography, an anachronistic focus on "progressive" political actors, and confused depictions of Reformed theology—offer their readers a history of American political and religious life that renders America's past congenial to contemporary secular sensibilities and provides a valuable tool in "correctly" reading the "original intent" of the religious clauses of the First Amendment.
The works under review, Religion and the Continental Congress, 1774-1789: Contributions to Original Intent, by Derek H. Davis, and Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment: Essential Rights and Liberties, by John Witte, Jr., are guilty of these intellectual shortcomings.[1] What needs to be made clear, and yet is obfuscated in differing ways by these two prominent Christian scholars,[2] is that America from 1630 to 1780 was predominantly Reformed Protestant in its religiosity, and continued to be powerfully Christian for at least the next 75 years. Although it is true that the nature of American religiosity was rapidly changing during the years after the War for Independence, this period witnessed a huge upsurge of pietistic and evangelical Christian activity and must not be viewed as a period of increasing secularization in any simple sense. Indeed, even as the particular goals and aspirations of America's seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century Reformed Protestant founders came to be rejected, the vast majority of America's religious and political leaders continued to insist on an intimate relationship between the public's need for moral citizens and the essential role of Christianity in achieving this end.
Given the overwhelmingly Christian environment of the early Republic, it is not surprising to learn that there was anything but a strict wall of separation between church and state. Yet this manifest reality is rarely conspicuous in the histories provided by Davis and Witte; in both books, but most particularly in Witte's account, the reader is directed to attend to the 1820s writings of James Madison and Thomas Jefferson rather than to the actual norms, laws, and practices of the vast majority of Americans living in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. The thrust of both books is to celebrate anachronistically the rise of the separation of church and state, religious pluralism, state neutrality between Christianity and its opponents, and the privatization of religion in America and its effectual disappearance from the public square.
Accordingly, many readers will become confused, conflating all who opposed close connections between church and state— including evangelicals and pietists, Christian humanists, and secular liberals—into a liberal, secular, and "Lockean" amalgam that plays well with contemporary academic sensibilities. Although Witte attempts to avoid such conflation, his efforts come to naught in the sweep of his all-encompassing narrative.
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