(Also posted at his own blog.)As John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson, “I do not like the late resurrection of the Jesuits; shall we not have swarms of them here, in as many shapes and disguises as ever a king of gypsies himself assumed?” As Jefferson replied, “their restoration makes a retrograde step from light towards darkness.”
The strange popular superstition that the Founding Fathers were devout Christians – prophets and apostles whose works, especially the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, are for all practical purposes part of the Canon of Scripture – urgently needs to be exploded. But 1776 predates 1789. The American Republic is not a product of the Revolution. Nevertheless, it sits under a radically orthodox theological critique, most obviously by reference to pre-Revolutionary traditions of Catholic and Protestant republican thought, on the Catholic side perhaps Venetian, on the Protestant side perhaps Dutch, and on both sides perhaps at cantonal level in Switzerland, where it is possible that such thought might hold sway even now.
Furthermore, Catholics, High Churchmen, Congregationalists, Baptists, Quakers and others retained, long after any hope of a Stuart restoration had died, grave reservations about the Hanoverian State, its Empire, that Empire’s capitalist ideology, and the slave trade integral to it. Far more Jacobites went into exile from these islands than Huguenots sought refuge here. Very many of them ended up in North America. New York seems the most obvious place to look for them, being named after its initial proprietor as a colony, the future James VII and II. However, there were many Jacobite Congregationalists, such as Edward Roberts, the exiled James’s emissary to the anti-Williamite Dutch republics, and Edward Nosworthy, a gentleman of his Privy Council both before and after 1688.
There was that Catholic enclave, Maryland. And there was Pennsylvania: almost, if almost, all of the Quakers were at least initially Jacobites, and William Penn himself was arrested for Jacobitism four times between 1689 and 1691. Many Baptists were also Jacobites, and the name, episcopal succession and several other features of the American Episcopal Church derive, not from the Church of England, but from the staunchly Jacobite Episcopal Church in Scotland, which provided the American Colonies with a bishop, Samuel Seabury, in defiance of the Church of England and of the Hanoverian monarchy to which it was attached.
The American Republic, as such, therefore stands, in every sense radically, in the same tradition as Britain’s campaign against the slave trade, Radical Liberal action against social evils, extension of the franchise, creation of the Labour Movement, and opposition to the Boer and First World Wars: radical action for social justice and for peace derived from testing the State and its policies against theologically grounded criteria of legitimacy. It still does.
And:
You can treat the Founding Fathers as if they were the Apostles, or you can treat the Apostles as if they were the Apostles. But you cannot do both. At the end of the day, Jefferson et al were, among other things, Deists and particularly ferocious anti-Catholics.
That does not invalidate everything that they ever wrote. But it does require that their work, including the Declaration of Independence and including the Constitution, be understood, like every other document or artefact in the world, under the higher authority of Sacred Scripture within Sacred Tradition. Where the two conflict, then that of divine as well as human origin and authority (it’s a Christological thing) obviously takes precedence over that of purely human origin and authority. Jefferson, I am afraid, is bound to come out of that particularly badly.
Providentially, there exist Catholic and Protestant pre-Revolutionary republican traditions on which to draw in redeeming the American republican tradition, which is also pre-Revolutionary, since 1776 came before 1789. And there were the doubts about Hanoverian legitimacy within the traditions definitive of communities significant in America both before and after the Colonial period, doubts which undoubtedly contributed to the popular reception of the ideas of the Founding Fathers, since it is very difficult to see what else about them – socioeconomically, culturally, philosophically, theologically – can have had much, if any, popular appeal. Jefferson, frankly, least of all.
If Mr. Lindsay could elaborate on these Catholic and Protestant pre-Revolutionary republican traditions...
