In the early 1980s, during Ronald Reagan’s first term as president, the Religious Right was gaining momentum and taking institutional shape. In 1983, as leaders in this growing movement were strategizing to assure a second term for the president they revered as a powerful ally in their cause, three prominent evangelical historians wrote a book titled The Search for Christian America (Crossway Books).
At the time, Mark Noll, Nathan Hatch, and George Marsden had each previously written important studies of American religious history. Each scholar went on in further research to contribute significant volumes to a still-growing library of historical studies demonstrating one of the key claims summarized in the Introduction to their 1983 study: “We feel that a careful study of the facts of history shows that early America does not deserve to be considered uniquely, distinctly or even predominately Christian, if we mean by the word ‘Christian’ a state of society reflecting the ideals presented in Scripture. There is no lost golden age to which American Christians may return. In addition, a careful study of history will also show that evangelicals themselves were often partly to blame for the spread of secularism in contemporary American life.”
Early chapters in The Search for Christian America examined the thought and political aims of the Puritans, Roger Williams, and Jonathan Edwards, among others. Chapter four in the book is titled “What Should Christians Think of the American Revolution?” A significant section of the chapter examines the ideas about politics espoused by the Scottish-American Presbyterian minister John Witherspoon, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. As the most obviously Christian among the Founders, Witherspoon acquired a prominent place in arguments made by Christians in the 1980s that America was a Christian nation.
John Witherspoon came to America in 1768 to accept the post of President of the College of New Jersey, later known as Princeton. Noll, Hatch, and Marsden note some significant differences between Witherspoon’s concerns while serving as a Scottish churchman and his public teaching in the colonies.
“In Scotland, Witherspoon was a defender of orthodoxy and an acknowledged leader of the Evangelical Party in the Presbyterian Church. In particular, Witherspoon insisted in sermons and printed treatises that God’s saving grace and the testimony of Scripture were essential for undergirding social well-being in this life and everlasting security in the world to come. Such views propelled Witherspoon into the leadership of an Evangelical party which struggled against the Scottish Moderates, a group that gave enthusiastic support to the Enlightenment. Witherspoon’s attacks were especially strong against the skepticism of David Hume and the ethics of Francis Hutcheson, who saw no need for Scripture or God’s grace in developing moral or political theory. Yet a strange transformation took place when Witherspoon crossed the Atlantic. As Princeton’s professor of moral philosophy, Witherspoon was required to lecture on the principles of politics. But to guide this effort Witherspoon turned instinctively to the books of his erstwhile theological opponents, Hume, Hutcheson, and other philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment. . . .
“The most serious difficulty in Witherspoon’s political thought, however, was not its momentary loss of balance, it was rather its frankly naturalistic basis. Witherspoon, unlike Madison, was required to lecture on politics, and so we possess written statements of his thought. They present a disturbing picture inasmuch as they lack essential elements of a genuinely Christian approach to public life. That is, Witherspoon’s lectures on politics and his public statements at the Congress nowhere expressed the conviction that all humans, even those fighting against British tyranny, were crippled by sin and needed redemption. They also failed to affirm that it was God’s gracious providence which undergirded political life of whatever kind rather than simply nature or human nature by itself. Witherspoon’s politics breathe a different spirit than his evangelical sermons. In politics he seems very much a spokesman for the Enlightenment. Politics is rooted, according to Witherspoon, in ‘conscience enlightened by reason, experience, and every way by which we can be supposed to learn the will of our Maker, and his intentions in creating us such as we are.’ But when Witherspoon said this, he explicitly excluded the Bible from what we can learn about ‘the will of our Maker,’ at least as far as politics is concerned, In fact, he began the lectures from which this quotation comes by affirming that they were ‘an inquiry into the nature and grounds of moral obligation by reason, as distinct from revelation.’ And in the same lectures he criticized Cotton Mather for thinking that ‘moral philosophy,’ including politics, needed special insights from God’s grace or his revelation. So Witherspoon was left to derive his politics from nature and from natural human conscience.
“Modern students of Witherspoon are in fact surprised at his rejection of a biblical basis in his political thought, because they know of his reputation as an evangelical. James McAllister, author of one of the fullest recent essays on Witherspoon’s role in the Revolution, asks the question, ‘How large a role did the biblical revelation play in his theory of civil law?’ And McAllister concluded; ‘The answer to the question regarding the biblical contribution to Witherspoon’s teaching about the law and liberty is: almost nothing. . . . his theory of society and civil law was based not on revelation but on the moral sense enlightened by reason and experience.’ [James L. McAllister, “John Witherspoon: Academic Advocate for American Freedom,” in A Miscellany of American Christianity, Stuart C. Henry, ed. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1963)] Virtually the same conclusion appears in the best, and most recent, history of American philosophy: ‘It is clear that he had drunk more deeply of the Scottish Enlightenment than the [Princeton] trustees (and perhaps he himself) had supposed. . . . In further contrast to Edwards, and it seems his own earlier position at Edinburgh, Witherspoon taught that questions of morality and virtue could be investigated as a branch of science and that our duties could be demonstrated by rational and empirical means. Thus he starts his ethics, not with premises guaranteed by religion or revelation, but from the construction of human nature as learned by observation.’ [Elizabeth Flower and Murray G. Murphey, A History of Philosophy in America, two volumes (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1977)]
“The primary difficulty with Witherspoon, and many of his ‘real’ Whig colleagues, is not so much their conclusions, but how they reached those conclusions. Christians today should regret the way in which allegiance to the Revolution became just as important as the faith itself to some Christian patriots. But they should be pleased with the patriotic insistence upon the rule of law, upon the need for virtue in a population, and upon the dangers of unchecked power. By the same token, modern believers should find the concept of God held by patriots, including Witherspoon, deficient. The ‘Author of Nature’ can never be the same as the God who has revealed his will for humanity in Christ and in Scripture. Yet comparatively speaking, the Revolution’s ‘Author of Nature’ provided for considerable justice. And the patriots’ respect for the ‘Author of Nature’ allowed religious perspectives to function openly in public life. These are important matters, for they are not always present in modern America where secularism and materialism have such influence.
“At the same time, however, modern Christians should recognize what the political thinking of Witherspoon and like-minded Revolutionaries involved. Witherspoon did not derive his politics from the Bible. He did not think the Christian God had a specific role to play in public life, where the rule of nature prevailed. And he did not worry about assuming an Enlightenment perspective on political matters.
“In itself this stance was not necessarily wrong. Christians may often profitably use theories, concepts, or proposals ‘from the world.’ They can rejoice, for example, when someone like Thomas Jefferson, who had no use for a divine Jesus or a supernatural Bible, questioned the state’s control of churches, even if many of those who supported a continued role for the state in the churches included evangelicals like Witherspoon and Patrick Henry.
“At the same time believers must see that the positive parts of the ‘radical’ Whig theory were not Christian in a direct sense. At their best, they included political values compatible with biblical values. They were not in themselves biblical, nor were they drawn from the Bible, nor should they be equated with Christianity.
“The natural process of reasoning which led Witherspoon and other Christians to join the Revolutionary cause represents a grave danger, especially when it is regarded as a Christian process. In terms developed by Francis Schaeffer in his early books, the Revolution represented the growing power of ‘nature’ at the expense of ‘grace.’ Admittedly, the founding fathers still were better than many modern political ideologists, for God remained a vital part of their political thought, even as the ‘Author of Nature.’ But their general efforts opened up the same pathway for nature to devour grace that has been a persistent danger in Western culture since the Renaissance. Witherspoon was an upstanding Christian person, but his political theory was more directly a product of nature than was, for example, the political and economic views of the medieval Catholic theologian, Thomas Aquinas. Witherspoon’s politics was certainly more theistic than much modern politics, for he was a part of the eighteenth century where some kind of God was a widely shared presupposition. Yet in Witherspoon, the most self-consciously evangelical of the founding fathers, there is little of the effort which marked the work of earlier Christian thinkers to ground politics in specifically Christian propositions. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, John Knox, and (after Witherspoon’s day) Abraham Kuyper in the Netherlands all tried to develop political theory which reflected the truths of Scripture as well as the natural constitution of human beings and society. But Witherspoon and his fellow patriots did not. Witherspoon remains valuable as an example of courageous activity by a Christian in public life. And many of the specific principles which he supported may still be supported by Christians. But it would be foolish, to believe that the way in which Witherspoon reasoned about politics should ever serve as a model for Christian political thought.
“With another vocabulary, it is clear that Witherspoon’s approach to politics opened the door to secularization. His approach, though not his conclusions, was as humanistic as anything in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, from which arose the ‘secular humanism’ of our own day. The British sociologist David Martin has well described how secularization begins: ‘The key word is differentiation, meaning the splitting off of sectors, so that religion becomes one specific sector, not the essence of the whole. . . . Above all the casing of thought ceases to be theological. Philosophy is naturalised and becomes natural philosophy and sub-divides yet again into moral philosophy and other branches. Law finds a justification in social necessity rather than divine edict. Morals seek a foundation in rules of reciprocity and a calculus of happiness. The state appeals to the voice of the people rather than the voice of God.’ This is exactly the process underway in the Revolutionary period. It describes precisely the ideas which Witherspoon communicated to his students at Princeton, but it also marks the thinking of others, like Madison, who also had a Christian background. Patriotic thought, even when expressed by Christians like Witherspoon, was proceeding on its own. It was independent from the ‘casing’ of Christian doctrine or the Bible.
“A present danger flows directly from the activities of patriots like Witherspoon. Contemporary evangelicals often fail to recognize that the American political tradition is a mixed heritage. It contains much that comports well with biblical faith. But it also contains the seed of secularization which has led to so many problems in American public life. The call for evangelicals to be involved in public action for Christ in the late twentieth century must involve, as even a minor part of the effort, a repudiation of the nature-grace confusions of the late eighteenth century. One of the reasons evangelicals are confused as they enter the political arena today is that they are not self-critical about a political tradition which, for all its good parts, has never been a distinctly Christian one. As Christians, we should not condemn the ‘real’ Whig thought of the Revolution as pagan. But we should not entertain romantically unrealistic opinions about its Christian character. Secular processes were at work in the ideology of the patriots, and Christians like Witherspoon encouraged those processes. This secularism has had negative results, even if many of the positive accomplishments of the Revolution have served Christians, and all citizens, very well. To be better witnesses for Christ in modern America, however, evangelicals must realize why the political system is now thoroughly secularized. If we understand our history properly, we will have to join Pogo, the comic strip character, in saying that we have met the enemy, and it is us.
“In sum, the thought of the Revolution was not itself Christian. This is not to say that it lacked elements in harmony with Christian faith, for there were many. Nonetheless, the Revolution marked an advance of secularization. Christians contributed directly to this secularization, especially when they identified the Revolutionary ideology, which grounded law and governmental institutions on nature, with the revealed will of God. In the eighteenth century, to be sure, nature and God were linked together, but later on the culture’s view of nature eliminated God. When this happened, evangelicals found themselves without a basis from which to analyze and combat the new secularism, for they too had agreed that a good politics and a just society could arise merely from the study of nature. In the belief that natural reasoning and God would stay together, they married the political spirit of the eighteenth century; one hundred years later they found themselves widowed, clinging to a nature which the larger culture had decided could get along very well without God. Christians, to our very day, have continued to express the fundamentally misplaced hope that a nation founded upon nature could come back to its Christian home. But since there had never been a genuinely Christian home, the desire for return promotes only nostalgic myth-making and contemporary confusion.
“When Christians realize the mixed legacy of the Revolution, they do not have to condemn it out of hand. But if they would avoid both the mistaken loyalty of ‘real’ Whig patriots, who sought first the American cause and its righteousness, and the naturalistic tendencies of ‘real’ Whig thought, which set America’s hand to a secular plow from which it has never looked back, they must perceive the differences, as well as the similarities, between their Christian faith and the ideals of the Revolution.”
— from Mark A. Noll, Nathan O. Hatch, & George M. Marsden, The Search for Christian America (Crossway Books, 1983)