Ethics

John Adams & the other Key Founders

By Ed Brayton

The Liberty Fund recently uploaded a great deal of John Adams' personal writings. I think Adams is important because he is recognized as quite a mainstream and conservative figure among the Founding Fathers. The 1800 Presidential election against Jefferson was quite "tumultuous," as one book put it. The forces of "religious correctness" sided with the "Christian" Adams against the "infidel" Jefferson who was suspected of being a strict deist if not an atheist. That dynamic colors our perception (or misperception) of their religion to this day.

The irony is Adams wasn't nearly as "orthodox" as his Christian supporters thought and Jefferson wasn't as deistic or atheistic. They shared a religious creed that was remarkably similar on the basics. It wasn't quite deism and wasn't quite orthodox Christianity, but something in between. We could call it "Christian-Deism," "unitarianism" (though not Unitarianism) or "theistic rationalism." That such divergent figures as Jefferson and Adams agreed on their personal religious creed demonstrates how mainstream it probably was among the Founding Fathers.

In this post at American Creation I reproduced a great deal of Adams' original writings from the Liberty Fund, focusing on Joseph Priestley, the figure who mentored Jefferson's and Adams' theological views. I show Adams at his most heterodox.

Full post as published by Dispatches from the Culture Wars on January 11, 2009 (boomark / email).