Ethics

Waldman on the Founding Fathers and Religion

By Ed Brayton

Steven Waldman, editor-in-chief of Beliefnet, has a new book out called FOUNDING FAITH: Providence, Politics and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America. I haven't read the book yet, though I hope to do so and to write a review of it, but he has two essays at the TPMCafe that seem quite reasonable to me. He seems to stake out much the same territory that Jon Rowe and I (and many others, of course) have for the last few years, arguing that the key founders do not fit easily into the simple categories of deist or Christian.

The first essay, Fallacy #1: The Founders Weren't Deists, makes an argument I've made many times. All of the key founders clearly expressed their belief in an active, provident, benevolent and personal God rather than the distant watchmaker god of deism. Certainly they believed many things that were consistent with deism, but it's still a misnomer to say that they were deists. They were theists.

Full post as published by Dispatches from the Culture Wars on March 14, 2008 (boomark / email).