Product Description

The culture wars have distorted the dramatic story of how Americans came to worship freely. Many activists on the right maintain that the United States was founded as a “Christian nation.” Many on the left contend that the Founders were secular or Deist and that the First Amendment was designed to boldly separate church and state throughout the land. None of these claims are true, argues Beliefnet.com editor in chief Steven Waldman. With refreshing objectivity, Waldman narrates the real story of how our nation’s Founders forged a new approach to religious liberty, a revolutionary formula that promoted faith . . . by leaving it alone.

This fast-paced narrative begins with earlier settlers’ stunningly unsuccessful efforts to create a Christian paradise, and concludes with the presidencies of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison, during which the men who had devised lofty principles regarding the proper relationship between church and state struggled to practice what they’d preached. We see how religion helped cause, and fuel, the Revolutionary War, and how the surprising alliance between Enlightenment philosophers such as Jefferson and Madison and evangelical Christians resulted in separation of church and state.

As the drama unfolds, Founding Faith vividly describes the religious development of five Founders. Benjamin Franklin melded the morality-focused Puritan theology of his youth and the reason-based Enlightenment philosophy of
his adulthood. John Adams’s pungent views on religion–hatred of the Church of England and Roman Catholics–stoked his revolutionary fervor and shaped his political strategy. George Washington came to view religious tolerance as a military necessity. Thomas Jefferson pursued a dramatic quest to “rescue” Jesus, in part by editing the Bible. Finally, it was James Madison–the tactical leader of the battle for religious freedom–who crafted an integrated vision of how to prevent tyranny while encouraging religious vibrancy.

The spiritual custody battle over the Founding Fathers and the role of religion in America continues today. Waldman provocatively argues that neither side in the culture war has accurately depicted the true origins of the First Amendment. He sets the record straight, revealing the real history of religious freedom to be dramatic, unexpected, paradoxical, and inspiring.

An interactive library of the key writings by the Founding Father, on separation of church and state, personal faith, and religious liberty can be found at www.beliefnet.com/foundingfaith.

Praise for Founding Faith
“Steven Waldman, a veteran journalist and co-founder of Beliefnet.com, a religious web site, surveys the convictions and legacy of the founders clearly and fairly, with a light touch but a careful eye.”—New York Times Book Review
“Waldman ends by encouraging us to be like the founders. We should understand their principles, learn from their experience, then have at it ourselves. “We must pick up the argument that they began and do as they instructed – use our reason to determine our views.” A good place to start is this entertaining, provocative book.”—New York Times Book Review
"Steven Waldman's enlightening new book, "Founding Faith," is wise and engaging on many levels, but Waldman has done a particular service in detailing Madison's role in creating a culture of religious freedom that has served America so well for so long…."Founding Faith" is an excellent book about an important subject: the inescapable—but manageable—intersection of religious belief and public life. With a grasp of history and an understanding of the exigencies of the moment, Waldman finds a middle ground between those who think of the Founders as apostles in powdered wigs and those who assert, equally inaccurately, that the Founders believed religion had no place in politics."–Newsweek

"Well-wrought, well-written and well-reasoned—a welcome infusion of calm good sense into a perennially controversial and relevant subject."–Kirkus

"Founding Faith takes up two central questions about religion in early America. First, what did such Founding Fathers as Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison usually believe? And second, how did it come about that the First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees that "Congress shall make no laws respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof"? The answers to these questions carry implications for our lives today, since at stake is the flash-point principle of the separation of church and state." –Washington Post

“There is a fierce custody battle going on out there for ownership of the Founding Fathers. Founding Faith strikes me as a major contribution to that debate, a sensible and sophisticated argument that the Founders’ religious convictions defy our current categories.”
–Joseph Ellis, author of American Creation

“Steven Waldman does a great job describing the nuances of the Founders’ beliefs and the balances they struck, thus rescuing them from those on both sides who would oversimplify their ideas.”
–Walter Isaacson, president of the Aspen Institute and author of Benjamin Franklin: An American Life.

“This is a history every American should know, and Waldman masterfully tells it.”
–Jim Wallis, author of The Great Awakening

“Steven Waldman recovers the founders’ true beliefs with an insightful and truly original argument. It will change the way you think about the separation of church and state.”
–George Stephanopoulos, chief Washington correspondent, ABC News, and anchor of This Week

“Steve Waldman makes the strong case that the culture wars have distorted how and why we have religious freedom in America. Americans can be inspired by this story–the extraordinary birth story of freedom of religion.”
–William J. Bennett, author of America: The Last Best Hope

“An unusually well-balanced book on an unusually controversial subject. Not every reader will agree with Waldman that, of the Founding Fathers, James Madison’s conclusions about religion and society were best. But all should be grateful for the way Waldman replaces myths with facts, clarifies the complexity in making the Founders speak to present-day problems, and allows the Founders who differed with Madison a full and sympathetic hearing. An exceptionally fair, well-researched, and insightful book.”
–Mark A. Noll, University of Notre Dame, author of America’s God

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #98175 in Books
• Published on: 2008-03-11
• Released on: 2008-03-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 304 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Various American evangelicals have claimed the founding fathers as believing and practicing Protestants who intended America to be a Christian nation. Secularists, on the other hand, see in the same historical record evidence that the founders were often Deists at best. Both views are grossly oversimplified, argues Waldman, cofounder and editor-in-chief of Beliefnet.com. In this engaging, well-researched study, Waldman focuses on the five founding fathers who had the most influence on religion's role in the state—Franklin, Jefferson, Washington, Adams and Madison—and untangles their complex legacy. They were certainly diverse in religiosity, with Jefferson a self-diagnosed heretic, for instance, and Washington a churchgoing Anglican who was silent on points of doctrine and refrained from taking communion. All, however, were committed to the creation of religious freedom in the new nation. Waldman deserves kudos for systematically debunking popular myths: America was not primarily settled by people seeking religious freedom; the separation of church and state did not result from the activism of secularists, but, paradoxically, from the efforts of 18th-century evangelicals; and the American Revolution was as much a reaction against European theocracy as a struggle for economic or political freedom. Waldman produces a thoughtful and remarkably balanced account of religion in early America. (Mar. 18)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
“Steven Waldman, a veteran journalist and co-founder of Beliefnet.com, a religious web site, surveys the convictions and legacy of the founders clearly and fairly, with a light touch but a careful eye.”
—New York Times Book Review

“Waldman ends by encouraging us to be like the founders. We should understand their principles, learn from their experience, then have at it ourselves. 'We must pick up the argument that they began and do as they instructed – use our reason to determine our views.' A good place to start is this entertaining, provocative book.”
—New York Times Book Review

"Steven Waldman's enlightening new book, Founding Faith, is wise and engaging on many levels, but Waldman has done a particular service in detailing Madison's role in creating a culture of religious freedom that has served America so well for so long….Founding Faith is an excellent book about an important subject: the inescapable—but manageable—intersection of religious belief and public life. With a grasp of history and an understanding of the exigencies of the moment, Waldman finds a middle ground between those who think of the Founders as apostles in powdered wigs and those who assert, equally inaccurately, that the Founders believed religion had no place in politics."
–Newsweek

"Well-wrought, well-written and well-reasoned—a welcome infusion of calm good sense into a perennially controversial and relevant subject."
–Kirkus Reviews

"Founding Faith takes up two central questions about religion in early America. First, what did such Founding Fathers as Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison usually believe? And second, how did it come about that the First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees that 'Congress shall m...

Review
“Steven Waldman, a veteran journalist and co-founder of Beliefnet.com, a religious web site, surveys the convictions and legacy of the founders clearly and fairly, with a light touch but a careful eye.”
—New York Times Book Review

“Waldman ends by encouraging us to be like the founders. We should understand their principles, learn from their experience, then have at it ourselves. 'We must pick up the argument that they began and do as they instructed – use our reason to determine our views.' A good place to start is this entertaining, provocative book.”
—New York Times Book Review

"Steven Waldman's enlightening new book, Founding Faith, is wise and engaging on many levels, but Waldman has done a particular service in detailing Madison's role in creating a culture of religious freedom that has served America so well for so long….Founding Faith is an excellent book about an important subject: the inescapable—but manageable—intersection of religious belief and public life. With a grasp of history and an understanding of the exigencies of the moment, Waldman finds a middle ground between those who think of the Founders as apostles in powdered wigs and those who assert, equally inaccurately, that the Founders believed religion had no place in politics."
–Newsweek

"Well-wrought, well-written and well-reasoned—a welcome infusion of calm good sense into a perennially controversial and relevant subject."
–Kirkus Reviews

"Founding Faith takes up two central questions about religion in early America. First, what did such Founding Fathers as Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison usually believe? And second, how did it come about that the First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees that 'Congress shall make no laws respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof'? The answers to these questions carry implications for our lives today, since at stake is the flash-point principle of the separation of church and state."
–Washington Post

“There is a fierce custody battle going on out there for ownership of the Founding Fathers. Founding Faith strikes me as a major contribution to that debate, a sensible and sophisticated argument that the Founders’ religious convictions defy our current categories.”
–Joseph Ellis, author of American Creation

“Steven Waldman does a great job describing the nuances of the Founders’ beliefs and the balances they struck, thus rescuing them from those on both sides who would oversimplify their ideas.”
–Walter Isaacson, president of the Aspen Institute and author of Benjamin Franklin: An American Life.

“This is a history every American should know, and Waldman masterfully tells it.”
–Jim Wallis, author of The Great Awakening

“Steven Waldman recovers the founders’ true beliefs with an insightful and truly original argument. It will change the way you think about the separation of church and state.”
–George Stephanopoulos, chief Washington correspondent, ABC News, and anchor of This Week

“Steve Waldman makes the strong case that the culture wars have distorted how and why we have religious freedom in America. Americans can be inspired by this story–the extraordinary birth story of freedom of religion.”
–William J. Bennett, author of America: The Last Best Hope

“An unusually well-balanced book on an unusually controversial subject. Not every reader will agree with Waldman that, of the Founding Fathers, James Madison’s conclusions about religion and society were best. But all should be grateful for the way Waldman replaces myths with facts, clarifies the complexity in making the Founders speak to present-day problems, and allows the Founders who differed with Madison a full and sympathetic hearing. An exceptionally fair, well-researched, and insightful book.”
–Mark A. Noll, University of Notre Dame, author of America’s God


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Customer Reviews

"Let every person know that we will not interfere with any person's particular religious profession!" *
As someone who, for the last quarter century, has researched and written about religious sensibilities in early America, I'm always astonished at the seemingly endless battle between those who insist that the Founding Fathers were orthodox Christians who founded a Christian nation (e.g., Tim LaHaye's Faith of Our Founding Fathers) and those who just as strenuously insist that the Founding Fathers were all Enlightenment secularists who loathed religion (e.g., Isaac Kramnick's The Godless Constitution). Although I think that there's more truth in the second than the first position, both of them are distortions, attempts to squeeze complex men and a complicated religious ethos into neat, unproblematic boxes.

It's refreshing that Steven Waldman refuses to compartmentalize in this way. His Founding Faith is a finessed treatment of the various influences, religious, military, pragmatic, and political, that coalesced to form the legal and cultural traditions of church-state separation. For Waldman, diminuitive "radically pluralistic" Madison is the real hero of the story who "deserves the greatest thanks" (p. 200). But Waldman reminds readers that Baptists such as Isaac Backus and John Leland were some of the most ardent champions of separation (unlike many of their 20th and 21th century descendants); that Thomas Jefferson, villified both during his own lifetime and afterwards as an atheist, in fact greatly admired what he took to be the ethics of Jesus; and that the first Great Awakening was a potent force in encouraging political revolution and independence. Waldman's point is that simplistic divisions of players into religious or nonreligious camps, as well as simplistically linear lines of causation when mapping the founding of the nation and the crafting of the separation policy, just don't have much explanatory value--even though they may be ideologically appealing.

I don't fully agree with everything that Waldman claims. I think, for example, that the case for the Founding Fathers being more deistic than anything else is stronger than he allows, primarily because I see 18th century deism as more fluid and less defined than he does. I'm also more ambivalent about the political influence of the Great Awakening than he is. But Waldman's treatment is pleasingly written, informative, well-researched and, given the current tiresome but loud cultural wars, remarkably timely. The book's final chapter, "They Were Right," focuses on the contemporary culture war by examining and debunking a series of "liberal," "conservative," and "common" fallacies about the Founding Fathers and religion. The discussions throughout the book of Madison's several-yeared campaign (including the sometimes torturous Constitutional debate) to establish religious liberty are especially good.

All in all, highly recommended.
_______
* Representative Elia Boudinot (New Jersey), in a 1789 debate in the House of Representatives on religious freedom and law. Quoted by Waldman on p. 150

Excellent overview
Highly useful book on the religion of the Founding Fathers, and their intent concerning religious freedom and the separation of church and state. Founding Faith is a fair and balanced book, puncturing liberal and conservative myths about the topic with equal cheer, and more importantly, placing the discussion squarely within the historical context of what the Founders were doing and what it was possible for them to accomplish.

So were the colonies Christian? Yes, of course, and more, predominantly Protestant with considerable anti-Catholic bias. Most colonies did have an established church, mostly Anglican or Congregationalist, yet, after the revivalism of the Great Awakening period in the mid-1700s, the colonies were more religiously diverse than ever. The fear that the British Crown would force all the colonists to be Anglican was a factor in the Revolution.

Some of the factors leading the young nation into religious tolerance were pragmatic. George Washington, for example, was trying to forge a unified fighting force out of a religiously diverse group of soldiers. He had to quell the level of anti-Catholicism because he was trying to persuade the French Catholics in Canada to join in the Revolution.

Were the Founders Deists? No, they weren't, as even Jefferson and Franklin acknowledged the hand of Providence in the affairs of men. But neither were the five Founding Fathers that Waldman profiles orthodox Christians. Franklin flirted with a variety of religions, including Deism (the philosophy that God created the Universe like a watchmaker creates a watch, and then retreated from participation in his creation), but he also was was interested in the Great Awakening and thought the influence of Christianity upon the morals of people was a good one. Adams was more likely than the others to support government involvement in religion, but he moved more towards Unitarianism the older he got and rejected much of orthodox Christianity, thinking that the much that was good in it had been corrupted, but that its founding principles were still the best. Jefferson was similar but more so. Like Adams, he despised the influence of clerics throughout history. He rejected the divinity of Jesus and the miracles, but was so enthralled by the moral teachings of Jesus he twice cut apart Bibles and pasted the parts he thought uncorrupt into new documents and apparently read them often. Washington was the most silent about religion, rarely attended church, yet often used the religious rhetoric of his day. He did, though, speak of religious equality (for Jews specifically) . Most important of all was James Madison, who was the primary writer of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Madison did not leave behind a clear record of his religious views, but from what there is, he seems to have been more orthodox than the others. He was, however, of all of them, the most devoted to the idea of religious toleration. One of the factors that shaped this was his knowledge of the Baptist preachers in Virginia who were often jailed and beaten, and who had to go through lots of hoops to even be able to perform marriages. Madison believed that religious support for one church over others was BAD FOR RELIGION, as well as the state, that it oppressed some religions while making the dominant one lazy. He also thought it a weak faith than needed government support, as well as believing it was bad to force anyone to profess and be taxed to support a religion in which they did not believe. The original language of what is now the First Amendment refers to the "rights of conscience", an even broader formulation than what is in the current amendment.

One of the important historical points that Waldman made is that Madison was a politician, who had to be able to get the votes of other Congressmen to get the Bill of Rights passed. Madison did not get everything he wanted, and what was passed enabled those who wanted some religion in politics to interpret the result their way, as well as those who wanted a strict separation to interpret it their way. Most importantly, Madison did not get a law that applied the Bill of Rights to the states. This meant, for example, that states were perfectly free to establish churches, which most did, though they gradually disappeared during the first half of the nineteenth century. It wasn't until the 14th Amendment was passed after the Civil War that the Bill of Rights did apply to the states.

Waldman's most important point, perhaps, is that many religious people did then and do now support religious toleration. "He [Madison] and his Baptist allies would be mystified by the assumption that being pro-separation means being anti-God." (p. 201). It seems no coincidence that the United Sates is one of the most religiously free, religiously diverse, and religiously flourishing nations on earth.

Extraordinary--Elegant in Concise Inisights and a Holistic Appraisal
This is a very special book. The author has done an utterly superb job of original research and elegant concise representation of the nuances in belief, practice, and circumstances with respect to the matter of religion as confronted by the Founding Fathers, and especially Ben Franklin, John Adams, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison.

We learn early on that freedom of religion was originally designed to apply only at the federal level--only later, when the North pushed through the Fourteenth amendment, did this get grandfathered upon the states.

We learn throughout the book that the original evangelicals wanted separation of the church and state, and made common cause with the rationalists, both groups believing that individual liberty and freedom of personal conscience were the core values.

Midway through the book we are confronted by the author with the reality that the diversity of faiths existent today in the USA render meaningless and unachievable any thought of America being a Christian or even a Protestant nation--pluralism rules.

Religion was appreciated by the Founding Fathers for its generally good impact on civic morals. George Washington especially, in the Continental Army, demanded religious tolerance, authorized chaplains, encouraged officers and men to attend religious services, and generally communicated a sense that the American Revolution was a "holy war" with God standing firmly with the colonies against England and the Church of England.

The author provides concise but no less shocking accounts of the early religious wars in America, with torture and execution and jail being imposed on Quakers and Baptists, Protestants against Jews and Catholics.

We learn that both Jefferson and Franklin doubted divinity but respected Jesus for his moral code.

Adams considered Catholics the "whore of Babylon" and this resonates with more than one modern US evangelical who has endorsed John McCain.

We larn that the Great Awakening and the revivals spawned a general practice of questioning authority.

The author draws a clear connection between political liberty and religious freedom--the two were intertwined from the beginning of the revolutionary impulse.

George Washington was spiritual but not theological.

There are many gifted turns of phrase throughout the book. One that stayed with me: Jefferson saw God not as devine, but as a "brilliant wise reformer offering a benevolent code of morals."

Madison held a dispassionate faith in contrast to the others. He also felt that one should err on the side of separation.

From page 192 the author lists and discuonts four liberal and four conservative falacies. Buy the book.

The conclusion is as elegant as the rest of the book: Separation is the root condition for nurturing the fullest possible religious diversity and vitality.

I put this book down with an intellectual, spiritual, and civic "WOW" in mind. Truly an extraordinary work, a very important work, a lovely piece of scholarship that is meaningful to every American and every immigrant would would be an American citizen.

Other books that are faith-related that I recommend:
God's Politics LP
The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right
Faith-Based Diplomacy: Trumping Realpolitik
The Complete Conversations with God (Boxed Set)
American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America
Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction
Dogs of God: Columbus, the Inquisition, and the Defeat of the Moors

DVDs I recommend:
Gandhi (Widescreen Two-Disc Special Edition)
Bonhoeffer
Tibet - Cry of the Snow Lion