Remembering Gordon Wood: Religion and the Republic

Guest Blogger

Arvind Kurian Abraham

Gordon S. Wood, who tragically passed away, was arguably one of the greatest historians of the early American republic of his generation. His death leaves an enormous void, not merely in the academy, but in public life, at precisely the moment when Americans most need the kind of careful, nuanced, evidence-driven historical understanding that Wood devoted his life to providing. Nowhere is this loss felt more acutely than in the debate over religion and the founding of the American republic, a debate that continues to generate far more heat than light, and one that Wood illuminated with characteristic brilliance.

Two competing claims dominate public debate about religion and the American founding. The first holds that the United States was founded as a Christian republic, citing the religious practices of early federal governments as evidence. The second insists the founding was essentially secular, resting its case on the writings of Jefferson and Madison. Gordon Wood’s scholarship did not confirm comfortable narratives. It complicated them.

He noted that while some Founding Fathers such as Patrick Henry, Samuel Adams, John Jay, Roger Sherman, and Elias Boudinot were devout Christians, several leading figures were not. Shaped by Whig liberalism, the writings of John Locke, and the influential Cato's Letters by John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, figures like Jefferson and Madison viewed religious enthusiasm as a kind of madness, the conceit, in Wood's own rendering, "of a warmed or overweening brain." Few were outright Deists in the strict sense, that is, believers in a clockmaker God indifferent to human affairs. Some were proto-Unitarians who denied miracles and the divinity of Christ, and who described the Christian church, in the words of South Carolina historian David Ramsay, as "the best temple of reason."

One of Wood's most penetrating insights was his recognition of how completely the religious landscape of America had shifted between the founding moment and the early republic, in ways that the Framers had neither anticipated nor designed. The old colonial churches were in decline, in their place rose newer, more dynamic denominations. The Baptists grew from 94 congregations in 1760 to 858 by 1790, becoming the single largest denomination in America. The Methodists, with no presence at all in 1760, had established over seven hundred congregations by 1790. Their uneducated itinerant preachers, willing to preach on town greens, racing fields, ferries, and in the churches of rival denominations. The expansions of religiosity in American society was part of the phenomenon known as the Second Great Awakening.

Jefferson, the Founding Father who had pushed furthest toward a secular conception of liberty, exemplified the gap between founding expectations and social reality. He had always maintained the outward forms of religious observance, attending church and serving on his local vestry, owing not to faith but to his deep aversion to personal controversy. Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia and the preamble to the 1786 Virginia Bill for Religious Freedom made clear that a citizen's civil rights were no more dependent on religious views than on opinions about physics. Jefferson was a sharp critic of orthodox Christianity. In fact, he believed that Trinitarian Christianity would die out and be replaced by Unitarianism.

Wood pointed out that after being attacked in the 1800 presidential campaign as a "French infidel" and "atheist," Jefferson became more deliberately visible in his public religiosity, speaking favourably of religion in his first inaugural address and attending church services held in the chamber of the House of Representatives. The federal government even permitted the U.S. Marine Corps Band to play religious music for the services. This was not a sign that he had changed his beliefs. Rather, it was an acknowledgment of the social reality of popular religion, which he could not ignore as president. Wood's history poses a serious methodological challenge for “history-based” approaches to constitutional interpretation. If post-ratification practices were products of political expediency rather than reflections of constitutional principle, can those practices legitimately serve as evidence of the Constitution’s original meaning or the founding generation's settled understanding of its limits?

Wood also argued that Jefferson had fundamentally misread why he had won the Virginia Assessment fight. The bill would never have passed, without the overwhelming support of dissenting evangelical Presbyterians and Baptists who simply hated the Anglican establishment and did not care what Jefferson's preamble said. "It was not enlightened rationalism that drove these evangelicals," Wood wrote, "but their growing realization that it was better to neutralize the state in matters of religion than run the risk of one of their religious opponents gaining control of the government." Wood's analysis carries a pointed warning for scholars who treat the Virginia Assessment controversy and Jefferson and Madison's writings as the authoritative blueprint for understanding what the founding generation had in mind on questions of state and religion.

By 1811, even New York's Chief Justice James Kent, who privately called Christianity a barbaric superstition, felt compelled to rule that blasphemy against it was punishable under common law, so powerful had the popular evangelical climate become, according to Wood. The settlement that eventually emerged, voluntarist, competitive, passionately evangelical, and distinctly Protestant in character, was one that neither Jefferson nor Madison had designed and that few among the founding generation had fully anticipated. In an era when the history of religion and the founding is routinely employed for political ends, Gordon Wood's guiding voice is one that will be dearly missed.

Arvind Kurian Abraham is an SJD Candidate at Harvard Law School. You can reach him by e-mail at aabraham@sjd.law.harvard.edu.