“All sober enquirers after truth, ancient and modern, Pagan and Christian, have declared that the happiness of man, as well as his dignity, consists in virtue.” – John Adams, Thoughts on Government (1776)
Was the liberalism that informed America’s founding rationalistic, individualistic, and godless? Many intellectuals and commentators have so contended—usually those on the political left, who tend to view those features as desirable. But in recent years, the American founding has also come under criticism from thinkers on the political right. They make the same accusations, differing from their left-wing counterparts in decrying these alleged traits of American liberalism. Prominent examples include Yoram Hazony, Patrick Deneen, and Adrian Vermeule, who offer variations on the argument that today’s antisocial and atheistic pathologies are the necessary consequences of American liberalism.
Dylan Pahman and John Pinheiro strongly disagree, and in their new edited volume, The Christian Roots of American Liberty, they marshal strong primary source evidence. The editors acknowledge America’s liberalism but demonstrate that it was “grounded in English common law, natural law, and Christian history and theology.” The American experiment, they maintain, is an outgrowth of these traditions, not a repudiation of them.
By “liberalism,” the editors mean the collection of beliefs and institutions “grounded in a conception of human persons as by nature free, equal, and rational, and thus, that justice in human government requires the consent of the governed and religious toleration.” Its American variant includes a theologically informed “skepticism towards unchecked political power.” Without Christianity, American liberalism is unthinkable.
The book is structured in five parts, each covering a major theme underlying the American founding: “(1) the theological basis for natural rights; (2) Christian support for religious liberty; (3) the protection of private property; (4) checks on state power; and (5) representative government.” Each of the parts features excerpts from notable Christian thinkers, including, for example, Thomas Aquinas on natural law and Lactantius on religious freedom. But there are also church canons, imperial letters, and Roman legal codes, which show how Christian teachings were expressed in institutions and government policies.
Importantly, Pahman and Pinheiro include texts that directly informed the American founding, often written by the founders themselves. These show how American statesmen interpreted Christian political thought and appealed to it to justify their separation from Great Britain. If the American founding was radical, it was in the literal sense of the word: proceeding from the root. That root is Christianity’s tradition of ordered liberty.
The volume also includes editors’ introductions to and discussion questions for each theme. This makes it particularly suitable for classrooms, seminars, and book clubs. Both in terms of setting the context and stimulating discussion, Pahman and Pinheiro have gone the extra mile to help readers get the most out of the source texts.
There are many surprising connections here. One of the most important, as well as underexplored, is the link between religious liberty and private property. It is well-known that private property rights are essential for maintaining “the existence of a legitimate domain of society other than the state.” But Pahman and Pinheiro show that historical recognition of the church’s property rights, most notably in the Edict of Milan, can ground the freedom to own in the freedom to worship. “Only when the state protected the property rights of the Church, possibly the first non-state corporate entity in history to enjoy such rights, did Christians see themselves as finally free.” The conscience-ownership link should be much more prevalent today in the debates surrounding America’s Christian and liberal heritage.
Other connections, while unsurprising, are very important for Pahman and Pinheiro’s thesis. “Life, liberty, and property” is a well-known liberal rallying cry. Even more familiar is its variant in the Declaration of Independence: “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” To the founders, “happiness” did not mean private or subjective pleasure. It meant virtue: the moral habits proper to a free, rational human being. This isn’t to say the founders’ conception of virtue was precisely the same as classical or medieval Christian views. Men like Franklin and Hamilton were much more optimistic than their predecessors about commerce’s contribution to human flourishing. Virtues like industriousness and thrift were more highly prized in the early days of our commercial republic.
The result was a republic whose moral architecture was Christian, even if some of its prominent architects were not.
Nevertheless, even here, there is continuity with ancient traditions of virtue ethics. “Without virtue, happiness cannot be,” insisted Thomas Jefferson. James Madison agreed. Despite the cynical interests-controlling-interests views usually ascribed to him, Madison did not think good legal rules and good men were substitutes: “To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea.” And we must remember John Adams’s famous admonition: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” The Bible, Cicero and Cato, Augustine and Aquinas, Locke and Blackstone—the founders indisputably drew upon the tradition of Christian natural law, in which happiness is inseparable from virtue, moral truth, and duty to God. This is obviously incompatible with the accusations that American liberalism and our founding philosophy are inherently utilitarian or atomistically individualist. Liberal political philosophy, natural law, and virtue ethics are closely related.
Even several thinkers admired by national conservatives and post-liberals, such as Sir Matthew Hale and Sir John Fortescue, embraced liberal tenets. Hale writes, “Natural Laws are as obliging in the state of Nature antecedently to any settled government among Men by mutual Capitulation or Consent,” affirming not only natural-law reasoning but also the state of nature as a fruitful political-philosophical construct. Fortescue emphasizes the fundamental difference between states in which a “king may rule his people by such laws as he makes himself” and those in which a “king may not rule his people by other laws than such as they assent to,” clearly preferring the latter. These titans of “conservative” thought certainly appear amenable to liberal insights, which, of course, is Pahman and Pinheiro’s point.
This book is not a forced attempt to homogenize “the Christian prehistory of American liberalism.” There are plenty of internal debates among the sources themselves, both explicit and implied. For example, there are major differences between Lactantius’s dignitarian argument for religious liberty and Locke’s voluntaristic one. Some of the celebrated documents advancing freedom of conscience also impose legal penalties for blasphemy (Maryland’s Toleration Act) or religious tests for public office (Pennsylvania’s Charter of Privileges). There can be good-faith debates about historical precedents and current tensions. But the very terms of those debates nullify the argument that America’s Christian heritage is necessarily at odds with its liberal heritage.
Pahman and Pinheiro have shown what should always have been clear to those who are intellectually curious and historically literate. They deserve credit for making it easier to teach and discuss American liberalism’s Christian roots. But of course, they did not discover those roots, and did not claim to. The various illiberal Christians who condemn America as rotten from the beginning simply ought to know better.
America is thus a Christian nation, in the sense that its political language, institutions, and practices owe a massive moral and intellectual debt to Christianity. Yes, several founding fathers held religiously heterodox views. But most of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence expressed public fidelity to Trinitarian Christianity. And even those who didn’t believed that Christianity would continue to play a dominant role in the nation’s self-understanding. It is to their credit that they created institutional safeguards for conscience while rejecting formal religious establishment. The result was a republic whose moral architecture was Christian, even if some of its prominent architects were not.
What does this mean for us now? Anyone paying attention to demographic trends knows that religion in general and Christianity in particular have seen better days. While there are initial promising signs among the young, America’s drift from the faith that shaped her gives us reason to worry about the resilience of ordered liberty. Having read Pahman and Pinheiro’s commentary and sources, what should we do about it?
The solution is to rededicate ourselves to our founding patrimony. Most importantly, we must reject the “wall of separation” between faith and politics that mid- to late-twentieth-century legal scholars mistakenly read into our constitutional tradition. Separation of church and state—a phrase that appears nowhere in our founding documents—is not an American idea, nor a valid one. Non-establishment is, and we should stick to it. The American religious landscape is even more pluralistic now than it was in the late eighteenth century, and contrary to the imaginings of integralists or Christian nationalists, that isn’t going to change. But that is an entirely different thing from the demands by aggressive secularists that people of faith must check their religion at the door. We have every right to deliberate on public issues according to our deepest moral and spiritual commitments. Indeed, as we learned from Pahman and Pinheiro, the founders would have viewed claims to the contrary as utterly bizarre. Provided the state isn’t coercively maintaining a naked public square, we have an opportunity to revitalize religious culture in a more organic way. As a Christian, I believe the nation will be freer and more virtuous for it.
America’s 250th anniversary is only months away. The semiquincentennial will occasion many reflections on the past, present, and future of our nation. Pahman and Pinheiro’s careful editorial work could hardly have come at a better time. Thanks to them, we can better understand and discuss Christianity’s essential role in American public life.
