“The Christian religion, as I understand it,” John Adams declared to Benjamin Rush in 1810, “is the brightness of the glory and the express portrait of the eternal, self-existent independent, benevolent, all-powerful and all-merciful Creator, Preserver and Father of the Universe. . . . Neither savage nor civilized man without a revelation could ever have discovered or invented it.”
Five weeks before his death, when he received an inquiry about his religious beliefs from a Congregationalist minister who was president of Yale College, Benjamin Franklin replied: “Here is my Creed: I believe in one God, Creator of the Universe: That he governs the World by his Providence.
In place of the Hebrew God, Deists postulated a distant deity to whom they referred with terms such as “the First Cause,” “the Creator of the Universe,” “the Divine Artist,” “the Divine Author of All Good,” “the Grand Architect,” “the God of Nature,” “Nature’s God,” “Divine Providence,” and (in a phrase used by Benjamin Franklin) “the Author and Owner of our System.”
Regardless of where they fell on the Deist spectrum, many Deists continued to respect the moral teachings of Jesus without believing in his divine status. But the tendency of Deism was to emphasize ethical endeavors—hence the concern of most Deists for social justice and their profound opposition to all forms of tyranny.
Continuing to belong to the Episcopal Church even when at variance with some of its central doctrines did not seem to discomfort the Deistically inclined founders such as Jefferson, for they liked its liturgy and the historic cadences of its language. The Anglican faith of Virginia differed from the New England Puritanism out of which Adams and Franklin emerged.
To discuss the religion of the founding fathers means to discuss religion in the United States of their time. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe were born and baptized in what Virginians of the time called “the Church,” “the Church of England,” “the Established Church,” or “the Church of Virginia.”
Debate within the church about who is eligible to be “in” and who must be excluded is nothing new. It was a main feature even of the very first years after Christ. That first debate was so long ago, and so decisively settled, that it is hard to realize today just how difficult a question it really was: Can Gentiles be included in the Christian church?
The awareness of the communal nature of exegesis was particularly highlighted in the early church’s encounter with the Gnostics, hermeneutical lone rangers who claimed to have received in secret both revelation and interpretive insight. Irenaeus, the Gnostics’ great opponent, rejected the possibility of secret revelation and interpretation because the meaning of Jesus and the
Another of the standard tools of the desert is the vigil. Keeping a vigil consists in changing one’s pattern of sleeping and using tiredness or the stillness of the night to foster a quiet attentiveness to God’s presence. The Christian tradition recommends vigils to those who are discouraged or in danger of giving up on the journey back to God.
Solitude is one of the defining features of the wilderness. When one is alone with God two distinct opportunities emerge. In the first place, one can be more attentive to the work of the Holy Spirit inside when freed a while from competing, outside concerns.