America’s Founders Blended Liberalism and Religion

In a special America 250 issue, Reason takes a look back at our country’s founding people and ideas. Read more here.

In “Why I Am Not a Conservative,” the economist F.A. Hayek averred that “what in Europe was called ‘liberalism’ was here the common tradition on which the American polity had been built.” He was neither the first nor the last to see America primarily as a nation rooted in individual liberty.

Yet to think the United States is purely a liberal country is to take a truth too far. The Founders drew on a panoply of sources, from classical philosophy to biblical theology, from the natural and common law traditions to the ideas of the Enlightenment. They took from each the insights that seemed best-suited to their project, and in doing so they created something at once revolutionary—a novus ordo seclorum—and rooted in the wisdom of the past.

To safeguard their freedom, the Founders divided power among the various branches and levels of government while establishing that core rights could not easily be put to the vote. Americans ever since have taken pride in having overthrown a despotic king and established a regime fit for a free people, where citizens are in control of their own destinies instead of being trapped by the circumstances of their births.

In spring 1906, the English sci-fi author H.G. Wells reflected on a visit to the United States in a travelogue titled The Future in America. America, he reported, lacked a social hierarchy with servile and patrician classes. “There is no lower stratum,” he wrote, and “no aristocracy at all.” Virtually all Americans were the equivalent of Europe’s “middle masses,” who engaged in “trading and manufacturing” and occupied positions somewhere between “the magnate and the clerk and skilled artisan.”

That situation had repercussions for American politics. “The two great political parties in America represent only one English party, the middle-class Liberal party, the party of industrialism and freedom,” Wells wrote. “There are no Tories to represent the feudal system, and no Labor party….All Americans are, from the English point of view, Liberals of one sort or another.”

As a member of the socialist Fabian Society, Wells did not view the American desire “not only to liberate men but property from State control” as an altogether favorable development. But he recognized it as an essential aspect of the American character.

In the middle of the 20th century, a school of thought that came to be known as “consensus history” echoed that observation. It held, in rough summary, that American culture was distinguished by an underlying “moral unity” of belief in such institutions as free enterprise and the Lockean social contract—that “the American community is a liberal community,” as the political scientist Louis Hartz put it.

That paradigm may have fallen out of scholarly favor, but it has endured in the popular consciousness. Think of President Ronald Reagan’s insistence that the United States was a “shining city…teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony…with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity.” That this image became something of a national mythos suggests that the American people see themselves in it. Our cultural self-conception is forward-looking, pluralistic, and entrepreneurial.

Note that the kind of liberalism we’re talking about here has not been limited to one end of the political spectrum. Not only does it occupy the broad center, but until a decade ago it was arguably more dominant on the American right (which championed free markets and small government, at least at a rhetorical level) than on the American left.

Even those conservatives who have viewed liberalism as a scourge on society—figures such as National Review‘s L. Brent Bozell Jr. in the 1960s and Notre Dame’s Patrick Deneen today—admit its centrality to American history. It’s for that reason that certain right-wing anti-liberals deplore the Founding as a philosophical mistake.

But if the American Founding was liberal, that shouldn’t lead us to think it was irreligious. Unlike the French Revolutionaries, who would topple their own regime a few years later, America’s Founders felt no rancor toward Christianity as a doctrine or the lowercase-c church as an institution.

It’s true that some prominent Founding Fathers were not themselves orthodox believers. But many were, and virtually all thought that religion helped create and sustain the conditions necessary for a free society to endure. Limited government was not possible, they believed, unless the people were morally well-formed and responsible.

“Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom,” Benjamin Franklin said. Or as John Adams more famously put it, “We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion….Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

“Examples of founders insisting that religion is necessary for morality, and that both religion and morality are necessary for republican government, could be multiplied almost indefinitely,” writes the political scientist Mark David Hall in his 2019 book Did America Have a Christian Founding? His answer to that titular question is yes, inasmuch as it’s clear the Founding generation was profoundly influenced by Christian ideas.

Patrick Henry—yes, the supposed coiner of “Give me liberty or give me death!”—was so convinced of the importance of widespread religiosity that he introduced a bill in Virginia that would have levied taxes on the people to support teachers of Christianity. James Madison rejected that policy in his eloquent Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments—not out of hostility toward religion, but because entanglement between church and state was apt to weaken or corrupt Christian belief and practice.

“It is known that this Religion both existed and flourished, not only without the support of human laws, but in spite of every opposition from them,” Madison wrote, alluding to Rome’s attempts to suppress the early church. “Experience witnesseth that ecclesiastical establishments, instead of maintaining the purity and efficacy of Religion, have had a contrary operation,” producing “pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.”

Henry’s proposal failed in Virginia, and by the 1830s the states had all ceased collecting taxes to fund houses of worship. Nonetheless, in the two and a half centuries since the signing of the Declaration, American culture has retained a higher degree of piety and religious observance than one finds in most other Western countries—including several with official state churches. Although there’s been slippage in some of these numbers, Americans have long been more likely than Europeans to attend worship services, to pray, to believe in God and the afterlife, and so on.

As the neoconservative writer Irving Kristol once put it, we should be able to acknowledge “the correct proposition that legally and constitutionally we are not a Christian nation” without proceeding “to the absurd proposition that we are in no sense at all a Christian society.”

It would probably not be going too far to say that liberalism and traditional religion have managed to coexist in the United States in a way that’s almost unique in history.

Seven decades before Wells’ transit of the United States, a young Frenchman named Alexis de Tocqueville cataloged his own visit to this continent in Democracy in America. Chief among his observations was that “Americans mix Christianity and liberty so completely in their mind that it is nearly impossible to make them conceive one without the other.”

“Anglo-American civilization,” Tocqueville wrote, “is the product (and this point of departure must always be kept in mind) of two perfectly distinct elements that elsewhere are often at odds. But in America, these two have been successfully blended, in a way, and marvelously combined. I mean the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty.” Later in the book, he explained that Europeans were accustomed to seeing those two ideals “march almost always in opposite directions,” whereas here “they reigned together over the same soil.”

Tocqueville went on to report that American clergymen took “a kind of professional pride” in standing aloof from politics. Like Madison before them, they realized that calling upon the coercive power of the state for spiritual purposes would jeopardize the church’s credibility in the long run. “We have seen religions, intimately united with the governments of the earth, dominate souls by terror and by faith at the same time,” Tocqueville wrote. “But when a religion contracts such an alliance…it sacrifices the future with the present in mind, and by obtaining a power that is not its due, it puts its legitimate power at risk.”

It wasn’t just prudence or pragmatism, though, that led people of faith to resist the allure of imposing their religious views on society through the force of law. The Judeo-Christian tradition had introduced the idea of moral equality, viewing every human person, regardless of social status, as created in the image of God and possessing an inestimable moral worth. Since we’re blessed with free will, we have both the duty to strive toward excellence and the right not to be coercively interfered with in that pursuit.

The unfolding of these ideas over time called into question the whole notion of rulers and subjects. When Thomas Jefferson declared that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” he was drawing a causal link between the teachings of the Bible and political liberalism. The Founders established a constitutional order with robust protections for individual freedom and a foundational commitment to consent of the governed—incarnating to the best of their ability the spirit of liberty—because they were steeped in the spirit of religion.

In the years after World War II, an idea associated with the conservative magazine National Review emerged holding that the Judeo-Christian moral tradition and the classically liberal political tradition came together in the American Founding, and that the marriage of those two traditions is no small part of what makes this country exceptional.

The primary expositor of what came to be called “fusionism,” the writer and editor Frank Meyer, pointed to a “synthesis of belief” in liberty and virtue that “the Founders of the Republic embodied in their lives and actions, discursively expressed in their writings and their debates, and bequeathed to us in the body politic they constituted.” The job of contemporary American conservatism, he thought, was to keep that synthesis alive.

During the last 10 years or so, broad swaths of the conservative movement have abandoned the fusionist idea, seeing it as ill-suited to the challenges of the 21st century. They argue that free markets and free trade have been bad for Americans, that separation of powers is an obstacle to the ability of a strong leader to shape society in accordance with Christian values, and that a “muscular” state must be used to destroy the left before the left destroys them.

Yet if the fusionist account of history is correct, the anti-fusionists are engaged in a far more radical project than most of them are willing to admit. They’re digging out the philosophical foundations that Ben Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison laid down to secure what they saw as indispensable preconditions for human flourishing.

“In the open lands of this continent,” Meyer once wrote, America’s Founding Fathers “established a constitution that for the first time in human history was constructed to guarantee the sanctity of the person and his freedom. But they brought with them also the human condition,” which is ever tempted to trample others’ freedom in order to bring about a utopia. That temptation is still alive and well. Fortunately, so is the belief in human dignity that can, if we’re faithful to our national patrimony, help us resist it.