Thanks but no thanks.
Jon Meachem, (sort of a cutie, huh?)
This book is a kind of secular liberal version of Jerry Falwell's LISTEN AMERICA! (1980): replete with quotes from "The Founders'" (usually out of context and incomplete),
broad generalizations, and politically-correct editorializing. Rather than illuminating and advancing this important field of religion and politics, it
obscures and retards it. Of the past twenty years of careful, intelligent scholarship on the subject,
he seems wholly unfamiliar.
Therefore, what purports to be a balanced, careful, and accurate study, is
in fact a superficial, ideologically biased, and historically inaccurate account. Almost all of the tired liberal secular litany against Christianity is here:
the "ferocity of evangelizing Christians (p. 4);
the "strangling" of religion by "extremism" (p. 5);
a colonial America of "ambitious clerk" (p. 6);
the "criminal" treatment of Native Americans by white settlers committed to converting them to Christianity (p. 45);
the close-minded, bigoted, witch-burning, devil-obsessed Puritans (p. 46-54)--
who persecuted women (especially that "devoted Puritan" Anne Hutchinson); the "African spiritual holocaust" by Christian slave traders and ministers (p. 45).
The entire rich and complex New Light theology of perhaps the greatest eighteenth-century American theologian, Jonathan Edwards, is reduced by Meacham to his sermon "Sinners in the Hands of An Angry God."
Such strident assaults on the rich "faith of our Fathers" (and-the civilized moral society it produced in America) is
really a slander on our history.
The evangelical message of God's love, forgiveness of sin through Jesus Christ,comfort and guidance of the Holy Spirit, eternal joy in heaven by God's grace, seems a closed book to the author.
He relies on an obscure treaty with the Arab Muslims in Tripoli (the Barbary pirates), drafted in the 1790s, containing the phrase
"As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion ... " the "Musselmen" need not fear us (p. 103). The fact that this means (to those acquainted with American and diplomatic history) that the United States was not officially Catholic (like Spain) and therefore not an enemy of Islam in the traditional European sense,
is not apparent to Meacham.
Extrapolating from a minor document to a founding principle is logically and intellectually suspect, as Daniel Driesbach has shown so well in Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation.
What is the "American Gospel" for Meacham? Well, it certainly is
not the Gospels of Christianity, which form the majority of America's religious heritage Rather, it is the
"Good News" that American faith is a vague, deistic 'civil religion," which in the public sphere has no doctrinal precepts except tolerance, moral relativism, and the goodness of man; and which relegates any specific faith or morals to private life.
After all, Meacham gladly proclaims: "For the Founding. Fathers, God's grace was universal" (p. 7).
This will come as a surprise to all those Calvinists who predominated in Early America.
But the true religious liberty established by the Constitution and still enjoyed today in America allows expression of personal faith in the public square. The purpose of these principles was to avoid the corruption of the church by the state and the free evangelizing that would create a Christian culture which would legislate moral laws.
Part of Meacham's misunderstanding comes from his over-reliance on the few Founders who were deists (Jefferson, Franklin, Paine).
If he were familiar with the better scholarship of the era, such as Jeffry Morrison's study of the influential President of Princeton (and teacher of James Madison and innumerable other leaders of the early Republic) John Witherspoon and the Founding of The American Republic (Notre Dame University Press, 2005), he would see the Calvinist blending of religion, education, and politics as more representative of the early American ethos.
Only as an example of contemporary liberal sociology and media is this confused book of interest.
It is as if the secular liberal consciousness said "Oh well, I guess religion is here to stay in America, but
let's make sure it is a vague, relativistic universalism that has no moral impact on the social order and does not interfere with our favorite sins."
GARRETT WARD SHELDON
UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA'S COLLEGE AT WISE
WISE, VIRGINIA
As for the wording in the treaty with the muslims of North Africa who were demanding we pay the dhimmi tax to islam, a very few courageous American men won a very important war and it was a stab in their backs for that wording to be placed in the treaty, not only that congress voted to pay war damage reparations.
There is an older book that is titled something like; "Congress, a history of cowardice," I don't remember the author and can't find it on the internet, but it is a terrific read, from the days of the Barbary Pirates up until when it was written, in the sixties I think, if that were in more peoples hands, we probably wouldn't have these people spending life times in Washington that will do or say most any thing if it is politically expedient to them.