Dudu Scheisskopf's belief that the Constitution's framers were "deists" blasted to dust

[Rudy Canoza]

II. Deism Overemphasized

Professor Stone’s evidence for deism’s surpassing significance is
flawed. By his own description of their beliefs, some of which were
indisputably deis­tic, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson do not
belong in the “flat-out” deist category to which Professor Stone assigns
them.[17] Deists thought that God does not “intervene[ ] in human
history,”[18] yet Franklin believed that God “‘governs the World by his
Providence.’”[19] Jefferson was “the primary drafter of the Declaration
of Independence.”[20] Professor Stone characterizes this document as “a
statement . . . of American deism,”[21] but its language shows the
opposite to be true. If God does not interact with mankind, why did the
signatories appeal to the “Supreme Judge of the World” to vindicate
their honorable intentions, and also express confidence in “the
Protection of divine Providence”?[22]

Another way to overemphasize the impact of deism is to overstate the
decline of orthodox Christianity. Professor Stone does this in part by
oversim­plifying the record concerning the complex issue of George
Washington’s religious faith. A letter to Lafayette is quoted in which
Washington said that he was “‘no bigot . . . to any mode of
worship.’”[23] It is also claimed that “Washington’s personal papers . .
. offer no evidence that he believed in . . . Jesus’[ ] divinity”[24];
that “[i]n several thousand letters, he never once mentioned Jesus”[25];
and that, “[a]s president, Washington was always careful not to invoke
Christianity[, but h]is official speeches, orders, and other public
communica­tions scrupulously reflected the perspective of a deist.”[26]

Contrast this rendering with the fuller picture. Washington’s statement
to Lafayette is accurately related as far as it goes, but Professor
Stone omits the critical words that follow the quoted phrase: “Being no
bigot myself to any mode of worship, I am disposed to indulge the
professors of Christianity in the church, that road to Heaven, which to
them shall seem the most direct plainest easiest and least liable to
exception.”[27] Professor Stone is correct to suggest that had
Washington been a committed Christian, one would expect to find more
references to Jesus and Christianity in his works. But Professor Stone
once again gives an incomplete account. First, at least one of his three
specific claims about Washington’s use of language is incorrect.[28]
Washington as president did not “scrupulously reflect[ ]” a deistic
perspective. In an October 1789 Thanksgiving Proclamation, Washington
referred to “Almighty God,”[29] hardly a “deistic phrase[ ],”[30] and
also urged that various “prayers and supplications” be offered,[31] a
nonsensical entreaty had he shared the deistic belief that God does not
“listen[ ] to personal prayers.”[32] Second, Professor Stone ignores two
public occasions when Washington did refer to Jesus. In 1779, General
Washington urged the Delaware Chiefs “to learn our arts and ways of
life, and above all, the religion of Jesus Christ. These will make you a
greater and happier people than you are.”[33] More importantly,
Washington ended his 1783 Circular Letter to the Governors of All the
States on Disbanding the Army by stating in his prayer for the Governors
and their respec­tive States that

God would . . . dispose us all to do justice, to love mercy, and to
demean ourselves with that charity, humility, and pacific temper of
mind, which were the characteristics of the Divine Author of our blessed
religion, and without an humble imitation of whose example in these
things, we can never hope to be a happy nation.[34]

Professor Stone also stresses the weakness of traditional Christianity
by claiming that it was in “serious decline [during] the Revolutionary
era.”[35] He proffers the fact that church membership had fallen to
“‘not more than one person in . . . ten,’”[36] as well as the assertion
that “[e]vangelicalism, as defined by its contemporary exponents, played
at most a ‘negligible role in the founding era.’”[37] Concerning the low
rate of church membership, Professor Stone does not reveal that his
quoted source, Sydney E. Ahlstrom’s A Religious History of the American
People,[38] explains low membership rates in a way that shows that these
numbers, in themselves, do not necessarily portend a decline in
Christianity itself.[39] As for Evangelicalism’s asserted “‘negligible
role in the founding era,’” Professor Stone relies upon Professor Mark
Noll, who wrote to show that Evangelicalism—a particular manifestation
of Christianity—however important in our day, was not influential in
“the 1770s and 1780s.”[40] Although Professor Stone uses language that
technically says no more than this,[41] the quote ends a three-sentence
paragraph in which the main point is the decline of Christianity as a
whole.[42] The suggestion is that this “serious decline” led to
Christianity’s, not just Evangelicalism’s, “‘negligible role.’”
Professor Noll’s article offers no support for this conclu­sion. In
fact, a few pages before the language relied upon by Professor Stone,
Professor Noll states that “Christian faith of a generally Protestant
variety played a large part in the founding era of the United States.”[43]

Beyond the specific factual errors in Professor Stone’s case for deism’s
surpassing importance in the Founding Era, one wonders why he makes the
argument at all. After all, the Essay is not a sociological work aimed
simply at cataloguing the religious beliefs of the Framers. Instead, it
seeks to advance a particular view of what they believed to be the
proper relationship between religion and the state. Professor Stone
claims that the Framers believed relig­ion should be kept in its proper
private sphere. Does the fact that some of them were deists corroborate
this assertion? Not at all. Even if it could be shown that all were
“flat-out deists,” that fact, standing alone, would offer no support to
Professor Stone’s claim. The Framers’ religious beliefs, in them­selves,
are irrelevant.[44] What is needed is specific evidence showing they
wanted to keep religion out of public life. Professor Stone’s Essay
provides none. In fact, the Essay focuses so much on religious beliefs
per se that it barely addresses the historical question actually
relevant to its principal claim.
III. Religion Was Not Solely a Private Matter to the Framers

Professor Stone makes no real attempt to convince his readers that the
Framers intended to restrict religion to the private sphere. He simply
makes this assertion.[45] The Essay offers no convincing corroborating
evi­dence. Instead, it presents only a miscellany of scattered
statements of weak proba­tive value.

Some of Professor Stone’s statements are too vague to be useful. For
example, what is meant by saying that the “Framers viewed ‘issues of
religion and politics through a prism’ that was highly critical of what
they saw as Christianity’s historical excesses and superstitions[
]”?[46] Even if true, this claim offers no detail on what the Framers
believed about Christianity’s—much less religion’s in general—proper
relationship to law.[47] It certainly does not sub­stantiate Professor
Stone’s thesis that the Framers would restrict all religion to the
private sphere.

Professor Stone does make the more specific claim that “[l]ong before
the American Revolution, the Puritan vision of a unified and orthodox
reli­gious community had proved unattainable.”[48] Professor Stone
encapsulates this “Puritan vision” of a “rigidly theocratic societ[y]”
in the phrase, “‘Christian nation.’”[49] He cites the language of the
U.S. Constitution as proof that the Framers did not intend “to establish
a ‘Christian nation,’ but rather to create a secular state.”[50]
Professor Stone is correct that the Framers did not intend a “Christian
nation,” i.e., a “rigidly theocratic societ[y].” But there is a very
large gap between this fact and Professor Stone’s broader assertion that
they wanted to confine religion to “churches, temples, and homes.”[51]
Consider, for example, that the same Virginia Assembly that in 1786
“passed Jefferson’s [Statute for Religious Freedom] also passed a
statute requiring the observance of Sunday as a day of rest.”[52] Thomas
Buckley writes that
[t]his legislation inaugurated a series of so-called blue laws which
would keep government firmly enmeshed in the business of religion.
Ostensibly designed for the benefit of the whole community, and without
reference to particular creeds or religious systems, they were in
reality meant to impose the beliefs and values of the dominant
Protestant churches upon the inhabitants of the state.[53]

Equally unsupportive of Professor Stone’s thesis is his assertion that
John Adams “was acutely aware of the need to separate religion from
politics. ‘Nothing,’ [Adams] wrote, ‘is more dreaded than the national
government meddling with religion.’”[54] This quote on its face reveals
the narrow focus of Adams’s dread—the national government’s “meddling
with religion.” Thus, Adams was not even talking about the general
relationship between religion and law, much of which, of course, is
implemented by state and local gov­ernments. Moreover, the letter’s
context shows that Adams’s concern was narrower still. The quoted
sentence is part of a paragraph in which Adams relates to Benjamin Rush
the alarm caused by suspicions “that the Presbyterian Church was
ambitious and aimed at an establishment as a national church.”[55]
Professor Stone also does not reveal that while Adams feared an
established church at the national level, he had no such qualms about
religious establishments at the state level. Adams was the principal
draftsman of the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution, a document that David
McCullough calls “one of the most admirable, long-lasting achievements
of . . . Adams’s life.”[56] The Preamble referred “to the constitution
as ‘a cove­nant’ or ‘compact’ between the people and God.”[57] The
language bespoke a “covenant ceremonial liturgy, rooted in the Hebrew
Bible and in a New England tradition going back to the Mayflower Compact
of 1620.”[58] The Declaration of Rights, which followed the Preamble,
“affirmed the ‘duty’ of all people to worship ‘The Supreme Being, the
great creator and preserver of the universe.’”[59] The Constitution also
required that both the Governor and Lieutenant Governor “‘be of the
Christian religion.’”[60] Even more signifi­cantly, the Constitution, in
language not drafted by Adams but supported by him,[61] also stipulated
“the payment of religious taxes in support of congrega­tional
ministers.”[62]

One statement offered by Professor Stone might initially seem sufficient
in itself to substantiate his “keep religion private” characterization
of the Framers’ perspective: Thomas Jefferson was “deeply committed to
the separa­tion of church and state.”[63] No elaboration is provided as
to what this con­cept meant to Jefferson. Maybe Professor Stone assumed
that everyone would know what “separation of church and state” entails.
The “separation” concept, and in particular Jefferson’s metaphor of a
“wall of separation,” has achieved iconic significance in the public
mind and in constitutional law.[64] Discerning Jefferson’s intended
meaning, however, is complicated.

Jefferson used his “wall of separation” imagery in an 1802 letter to the
Danbury Baptist Association.[65] He apparently never used it again.[66]
Professor Daniel Dreisbach argues that “Jefferson’s ‘wall,’ . . . was a
metaphoric con­struction of the First Amendment, which governed
relations between religion and the national government. His ‘wall,’
therefore, did not specifically address relations between religion and
state authorities.”[67] This interpretation not only is corroborated by
the text of the letter,[68] but also by Jefferson’s own con­duct. Thus,
although Jefferson as President refused to issue “executive
proclamations recommending religious observances,”[69] as Governor of
Virginia “he issued a proc­lamation appointing ‘a day of publick and
solemn thanksgiving and prayer to Almighty God.’”[70] The key question,
however, is whether Jefferson in­tended the “wall” imagery to suggest
that religious influ­ence should be barred from public policy debates.
Many have interpreted the “wall” to mean pre­cisely this—that people
have no right “to bring their distinct religious views to bear on
politics.”[71] Does Jefferson support them?

The answer is irrefutably “no.” First, Jefferson’s Danbury letter spoke
of a “wall” between church and state, not religion and the state.[72]
Using “‘church,’ rather than ‘religion,’ . . . emphasized that the
constitutional sepa­ration was between ecclesiastical institutions and
the civil state.”[73] This language would have appealed to the “New
England Baptists [who] framed their agenda in terms of disestablishment,
but . . . did not want religious in­fluences separated from public life
and policy.”[74] Second, Jefferson brought his own religious beliefs “to
bear on politics.” In the early 1780s he proposed slavery’s gradual
abolition.[75] Why? In part because,[76] as explained in his Notes on
the State of Virginia,[77] written in 1781–82, he feared that otherwise
a just God “by supernatural interference” would assist the slaves in
gaining their freedom by the “extirpation” of their masters.[78]

http://www.uclalawreview.org/getting-the-framers-wrong-a-response-to-professor-geoffrey-stone/


Shut your fucking yap, Scheisskopf, before I shut it permanently.