Following Carl’s lead, I would like to return to a favorite topic of our friend and mentor Peter Lawler- what he called the “accidental Thomism” of the American Founding. Peter continued a tradition of Catholic political thought going back to the 3rd Council of Baltimore which argued the American Founders “built better than they knew.” In other words, many of the Founders’ Enlightenment-era theories were bunk, but the institutions and practices they set up were quite good. So good that Thomas Aquinas and sound Catholic thinkers would agree with them if introduced to them today.
Peter’s specific contribution to this tradition was to advance an interpretation of the Declaration of Independence that claimed it expressed a synthesis of deistic and Christian ideas of God. Jefferson’s original rough draft only referred to “nature’s God”; the final draft approved by Congress adds references to “the Supreme Judge of the World” and “a firm reliance on Divine Providence.” Peter cites Fr. R.L. Bruckberger who wrote this in Images of America (1958):
There is no doubt in my mind that Congress and Jefferson had different concepts of God, an a serious difference on such a point as this implies two profoundly divergent philosophies…
Nature’s God, in the context of the reigning rationalism, which was also Jefferson’s, remained as mistily, as vaguely defined as possible, like Rousseau’s God in the Vicaire Savoyard, like Voltaire’s Great Watchmaker, the God grotesquely endowed by the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, and later by Robespierre, with the title of Supreme Being…
The Congress was in the tradition of the first New England Puritans, and in the Declaration this tradition prevailed of the period.
The greatest luck of all for the Declaration was precisely the divergence and the compromise between the Puritan tradition and what Jefferson wrote. Had the Declaration been written in the strictly Puritan tradition it would probably not have managed to avoid an aftertaste of theocracy and religious fanaticism. Had it been written from the standpoint of the lax philosophy of the day, it would have been a-religious, if not actually offensive to Christians….
Like great masterpieces of art, in which luck is strangely fused with genius, it radiates its own irrefutable light. (92-93)
In other words, the Declaration writers hadn’t planned on a deism-puritanism synthesis, but they “built better than they knew.” Peter Lawler repeats and expands this point by digging into the fact that Deists deny the personism of the Trinity:
For America’s most wonderful and effective theological balancing act, look to our Declaration of Independence. Our Declaration is hardly a coherent theological whole. It gets its greatness by being a compromise between the Deistic and more Calvinist members of Congress. The compromise is between the impersonal or, better, unrelational God of nature of the modern philosophers—particularly John Locke—and the personal, judgmental, providential God of the Puritans. By reconciling the God of nature (or, better, the God of Descartes) with the God of the Bible, our Declaration can be called a kind of accidental Thomism, although that result was intended by neither of the parties of the compromise.
Although this interpretation of the Declaration from Lawler and Bruckberger is thought provoking,1 I am convinced it is factually WRONG for a number of reasons. I could expand on all of these, but will focus the third reason:
Jefferson was not a “Deist,” but some sort of Unitarian. He himself uses the term “Providence” to describe God on multiple occasions (in his 1st Inaugural for example), he also believes in a God who is a “Judge” (consider the Notes on the State of Virginia, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that god is just).
The other members of the Continental Congress were not “Puritans,” but were mostly Congregationalists and Anglicans. It’s kind of silly to talk about the representatives of the 1776 Continental Congress in terms of their forefathers 150 years beforehand. The religion in New England was still Calvinist, yes, but with very different ideas on many topics. Massachusetts by 1776 was a place that had gone many new waives of immigrants, King Philip’s war (a fight with the native tribes), the French and Indian War, the Great Awakening, the taxation crisis, and much more. Bruckberger is WRONG to have expected them to impose a theocracy if given the chance, and Peter is wrong but less though to describe them as stereotypically “judgmental.” The American Colonies were 75% Reformed Church Protestant in 1776, but there were disproportionate numbers of Anglicans there at the Continental Congress. Whatever the case, they weren’t “Puritans.”
It is incorrect to characterize references to “nature’s God” and “creator” in the Declaration as exclusively Deistic “God words”. Orthodox Christians used these terms too at the time, according to Mark David Hall’s Did America Have a Christian Founding (which is my inspiration and source for writing this whole article):
…the Westminster Standards, a classic Reformed (Calvinist) confession of faith, refer to the Deity as ‘the Supreme Judge,’ ‘the great Creator of all things,’ ‘the first cause,’ ‘righteous judge,’ ‘God the Creator,’ and ‘the supreme Lord and King of all the world,’ both in the original 1647 version and the 1788 American revision. The Westminster Standards also regularly refer to ‘God’s Providence,’ and even proclaim that ‘the light of nature showeth that there is a God.’ Similarly, Isaac Watts, the ‘father of English Hymnody,’ called the Deity ‘nature’s God’ in a poem about Psalm 148:10.
Beyond those slam-dunk arguments, Hall points to Jefferson’s claim in the Letter to Richard Henry Lee. Jefferson said that in the Declaration he tried to write “an expression of the American Mind;” but that would be obviously false if he had been trying to slip “Deism” into our Founding document.
I don’t mean to be overly critical of Peter’s claim; there indeed are other aspects of the Founding we might argue are “accidental Thomism” where the “Founders built better than they knew.” But in this case I think what the Founders knew and built was just fine in the first place.
For another interesting (but questionable to say the least) interpretation of the “God” language in the Declaration is George Anastaplo’s claim that “laws of nature’s God,” “Supreme Judge,” and “Divine Providence” are analogous to the 3 powers of government- legislative, judicial, and executive. Jaffa was taken by the argument enough to cite it in his critique of Martin Diamond.
Great post, getting us prepped for Constitution Day...
On 1, have you read Lawler's Jefferson essay in Aliens in America? Pretty strong argument and fulsome use of evidence there, even suggesting that TJ was epicurean at bottom and possibly, more atheist than Deist, even if he was fascinated with the idea of Jesus as a moral teacher, and was willing to put general God-talk into public statements.
On 2, fair enough. Lawler was trying to channel Tocqueville there, and all other thinkers who think the New England Puritanism outweighed Anglicanism, Baptists, etc. in the shaping of America. You're right that there are problems trying to include key Founding moments in that shaping.
On 3, correct on "Creator," but I'd want to see more than an Isaac Watts poem for "nature's God."
On the letter to Lee, I think Lawler agreed with your interpretation of that--if he speaks somewhere of TJ "slipping in Deism," I think he means in a light and this-is-just-the-way-TJ-thinks mode. I.e., a mode that works well-enough with the Harmonization goal in the Dec. I don't see TJ's-Enlightenment-Rationalism/Lockeanism-that-is-bound-to-get-into-any-work-he-writes as being antithetical to TJ-trying-in-certain-docs-esp.-the-Dec-to-Harmonize. If Lawler says something like TJ had a sneaky Project to set a Liberal/Deist Time-Bomb into the Dec., I think that's wrong, but I don't recall him saying anything like that.
Fine post, CJ! Also, Carl, I think you speak correctly in your objections.