We are trying to sell our house, a surprisingly complicated project. For example, no matter how professional your wedding pictures or how cute your grandchildren’s artwork, neither should be displayed on the mantle or the refrigerator. Instead, you must depersonalize the house—hide your favorite books, pack away anything related to your hobby, remove any mottos or quotes hinting at your religious or political persuasion—leave no traces of you for potential buyers to focus on. Your MAGA hat in the closet or your BLM sign in the yard might prevent buyers from imagining themselves living in your house. And, please, use no paint more exciting than beige. After this come the legal documents. When you sell a house, you have to sign more than thirty documents to keep the bureaucrats filing, the banks happy, and the attorneys employed.
I’ve been reading one document left behind when we bought the house, the title search. It traces our property’s owners for almost 220 years.
Our home sits on land ceded by Britain to the new United States following the Revolutionary War. Passed in 1796 and quoted in our title search, the congressional act authorizing the partition and distribution of this land is titled, “An act regulating the grants of land appropriated for Military services, and for the Society of the United Brethren [Moravians], for propagating the Gospel among the Heathen.” The “heathen” in this case were not people settling in what would become Cleveland; the term applies to the Indians living in the area.
That the government would donate land to organizations hoping to evangelize Indians may surprise some. It misleads others. I’ll elaborate later.
In Beyond the Messy Truth (2018), Van Jones helps Americans understand the dynamics at work in the origin of our nation. He speaks first of the founding dream, that is the vision of a land where all men and women, regardless of their race or economic status, experience true equality. Against this, Jones posits the founding reality in which he acknowledges how far short of the dream the new country came. The founders introduced to that late-eighteenth-century world a nation of surprising freedom and familiar limits, where only landowners could vote, women could not vote or hold office, and, in a shameful departure from the principle that “all men are created equal,” one human being could own another. Change would come but not without struggle, including a bloody civil war. Though closer, the dream and the reality are not yet identical.
I find Van Jones’s distinction very helpful. I can explain the anomalies in the Founders’ biographies with this honest assessment of our nation’s early history. It allows me to see the Constitution, with its tacit endorsement of slavery, as the product of visionary pragmatism. (If you’re not ready for Jones’s book, Peter Hunt’s film 1776 musically reveals the role of compromise in America’s birthing.)
I would like to add one further premise to the discussion. At least some of America’s architects left us with the founding delusion.
Earlier, I said statements like that found in our home’s title search mislead some people. Chiefly, they fuel the notion of America being born as “a Christian nation.” Statements by Washington, Jefferson, Adams, and others are cited as prooftexts in claiming the United States, unlike any other nation, was created to be “Christian.” Ironically, some even point to the document known as The Jefferson Bible, a collection of Jesus’s ethical sayings privately published by our third president, as evidence of his being a Christian. In fact, it represented his effort to present Jesus as a moral teacher, stripped of impossible miracles and troubling claims to deity. While Jefferson was no atheist, he depended primarily on his reason to lead him to truth about the world and how to live. Those without such finely-honed minds, however, might need the teachings of religion to bring order to their lives. Hence, Jefferson’s belief in the importance of religion for a society.
Several other Founders viewed religion as useful to bring peace and civility to the rambunctious nation. The Moravians—who were orthodox Christians—had demonstrated their usefulness in helping tame violent impulses amongst “the heathen.” These Pietist Christians had already created a “prayer town” called Gnadenhutten, made up of converted Delaware Indians in what would become northeastern Ohio. Unfortunately, in 1783, only a few months after Yorktown angry patriot militiamen crossed the Ohio River to look for British-aligned Indians who had been attacking farms in Pennsylvania before slipping back across the river. Unable to find the Indians they sought, the patriots attack Gnadenhutten. They fatally-scalped all who lived there. True to their newfound Moravian convictions these Indians were pacifists and, according to eyewitnesses, died singing Christian hymns.
Ohio was too distant from the new government forming in the east to effectively punish the perpetrators, besides those forming the new government were focused on matters other than the massacre. No one was prosecuted for the deaths of the 96 men, women, and children. The Gnadenhutten massacre, though unknown to many Americans, was remembered by the tribes of the Midwest and became an impediment to Indian/White relations; in 1811, Tecumseh said to a future U.S. president, "You recall the time when the Jesus Indians of the Delawares [sic] lived near the Americans, and had confidence in their promises of friendship, and thought they were secure, yet the Americans murdered all the men, women, and children, even as they prayed to Jesus?”
Still, the nation’s leaders remembered the success of the Moravian missionaries in turning Indians into peaceful farmers. So, they encouraged this band of Pietists to push further into the wilderness. In capsule form, that congressional act pointed to the founding delusion.
The founding delusion suggests religion—even if it rests, as Jefferson believed, on irrational premises—is useful for creating an orderly society. This viewpoint involves two assertions: Religion is good for the other guy (not necessarily me) and religion primarily involves outward behavior.
Thus, politicians who possessed no particular religious commitment might encourage the building of churches or, more often, invoke God’s name in their speeches. Of course, America has been blessed with leaders, both on the left and the right, who were deeply committed Christians, but some politicians have simply found religion to be useful. Sadly, many voters have been lured by such rhetoric, seduced by politicians whose God-talk sounds good but who are only laying a trap to snare their votes. Perhaps this partially explains how a man with no known history of piety could win the votes of so many evangelicals. But I digress.
The founding illusion allows the inner person to remain unchanged. To use Jesus’s analogy, the outside of the pot is cleaned but the inside is left a moldering mess. Pastors have long known it is easier to get a convert to give up smoking, drinking, and dancing than to give up racism, anger, and greed.
Modern evangelicals are sometimes criticized for their emphasis on conversion rather than social ethics. While the so-called “great reversal” (that time around 1900 when evangelicals supposedly abandoned the social dimensions of the gospel) was never as widespread as some historians suggest, our single-minded emphasis on conversion may lead some to believe we are only concerned about our heavenly home, giving no thought to our earthly home where poverty is generational, people of color are denied dignity, and acquiring things is the evidence of God’s blessing on our every business practice. But, make no mistake: the more we hear the voices of Wesley, Wilberforce, Newton, and Palmer, the more we will realize any gospel that isn’t a social gospel is no gospel at all.
But, like those evangelical pioneers, we will not lose sight of the crucial issue of being born again. The evangelical realizes the eternal tragedy implicit in the bumper sticker proclaiming, “Born Ok the First Time.” Yes, those who aren’t born again might be persuaded to see the wisdom of the Christian social vision; but will they possess the inner strength to keep going when it is tough, to love their opponents rather than hate them, to confess as readily as they accuse, to hope in the face of despair? All of this calls for a new heart.
Tearing down statues of slaveowners and racists may be proper step toward the founding dream becoming a reality. But if those tearing down the statues have not felt God’s transforming touch, the Bible says their hearts are as stony as the offensive statues.
Van Jones’s distinction between the founding dream and the founding reality, provides a mature way to judge our history. It allows us to watch Hamilton without denying the founders’ flaws. It allows us to appreciate how far we’ve come, and to have hope while acknowledging how far we have to go. It allows us to say, “Get real,” to the radical leftists who say the founders were all scoundrels and to the far rightists who long for the good-old-days.
Keeping the founding delusion in mind may prevent us from falling for the pundits who would have us join them in their quest to make America a Christian nation again. Indeed, apart from being bad history, the very claim that ours was once a Christian nation may undermine our credibility as Christians. After all, who recalling our history of slavery and mistreatment of the Indians would wish to embrace the religion of those who sanctioned such behavior? On the other hand, recognizing the founding delusion allows us to examine each founder’s depth of commitment, fundamental orthodoxy, and capacity for rationalization or even self-deception. Read the passionate defenses of slavery made by some southern pastors and you’re left to wonder just who they were trying to convince. This, though some were unquestionable convinced they were faithfully expounding Biblical truths.
In the end, however, remembering the founding delusion should caution us against truncating the Christian message’s call to transformed living springing from transformed hearts. That transformation, called “being born again” not too many years ago, is the work of God. That work, as the nineteenth-century American revivalists taught, may take place in a moment; or that work, as the eighteenth-century American divines taught, may be the product of an extended process including realization, conviction, surrender, and acceptance. In either case, God is its Author.
American-born poet, T. S. Eliot found Christian faith after making England his home. Warning against the folly of touting Christianity “because it might be beneficial,” he wrote: “To justify Christianity because it provides a foundation of morality, instead of showing the necessity of Christian morality from the truth of Christianity, is a very dangerous diversion.” At the heart of Christianity’s truth stands a Christ who was far more than a good moral teacher, as Jefferson believed. Acknowledging Christ as a good moral teacher most of us are willing to do; acknowledging him as a Savior who seeks to deal with our sins makes us so uncomfortable we will risk taking Eliot’s “dangerous diversion.”
America’s founding delusion shows us just how dangerous.
