The Founders and the Bible

June 6, 2016
In a wide-ranging look at 30 influential statesmen involved in the creation of the United States, Richard (Greeks and Romans Bearing Gifts) delves into the intense religious thought of America's founding members through a collection of their journal entries, speeches, articles, and events, intended to squelch the notion that the nation was created on atheistic or deist principles. Through the haphazardly arranged chapters, he discusses the religious milieu of the time and offers a wide and deep range of the founders' religious observations and beliefs. Though they argued over many tenets of the Bible, "all of the founders embraced the biblical concept of an omniscient, omnipotent, caring God who not only created the universe but also intervened in it," Richard writes. In some of the most striking sections, commonly held beliefs about the founder's core deism are put to the test, as when Benjamin Franklin writes: "There can be no Reason to imagine he would make so glorious a Universe merely to abandon it." Richard's extensively researched book will be a welcome addition to current scholarship about the religious beginnings of the United States, but general readers will be deterred by the meandering structure and uneven pacing.

April 1, 2016
One long-running sideshow of the culture wars is a squabble about the Christian orthodoxy of the Founding Fathers: believers or heretics? Illuminating the question so greatly as to dispel it, Richard relays what and how Washington, Adams (John and Samuel), Paine, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Franklin, Jay, Hamilton, Henry, and others wrote about religion and Christianity in relation to such concepts as divine intervention, morality, republicanism, American exceptionalism, free will, biblical authority, life after death, human nature, sin, and church-state relations. He provides quotation-filled chapters on those matters, demonstrating how thoroughly the Bible suffused colonial and early republican American culture and how particular founders, especially the least orthodoxly Christian, studied the Bible throughout their lives; none of them was atheist nor even deistnot even Paine. Even when religion wasn't the subject, when they wished to speak with maximal weight, they adopted the language of the King James Bible. Although almost no one may read this book straight through, it is an invaluable resource, especially given its good, not overly complicated index.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)