Julia Sweeney's Discussion Forum

Isaac Kramnick writer and editor of countless books and articles related to U.S. history, co-wrote The Godless Constitution. I hadn't read much about the nation's founders and their religious leanings before this book, so I found it really interesting. Some criticize the authors for leaving out footnotes, and I would prefer footnotes, but there are so many interesting details in this book about many of the founders that even as a springboard for further reading, it's great. I get so worked up when people insist the U.S. was intended to be a Christian nation. (I get so worked up at TONS of religious right/conservative assertions that I'll probably need to start carrying nitro tablets with me whenever I read a newspaper or news magazine)
Caryn

If you like that, I'd recommend some others to you, as well. A short time into the first Bush-Cheney administration, when their efforts to dismantle our Constitution became apparent, I went back to brush up on my American History.

I read a lot of stuff, but the stand-outs that I loved, and the ones that made me the most enraged at the current administration, were:

Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation by Joseph J. Ellis

The biographies John Adams by David McCollough (recently made into a 7-part film by HBO and airing now - I think Episode 4 started this week) and Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow

Freethinkers, A History of American Secularism by Susan Jacoby (mentioned elsewhere in this forum)

And, of course, Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason

My self-designed refresher course was brought on by an indignant rage over having everything I'd ever learned it meant to be an American threatened by the highest-ranking American entrusted to protect those things, and the idea that my patriotism - my patriotism!! - was being questioned because I dared to think, "what the fuck is this monster doing to my country?!"

So my original reason for digging into these books was only partly to do with my concerns about the blurring of separation of Church and State. Reading these books made my righteous indignation burn brighter. I don't think I've ever felt so patriotic as I did when these books got my dander up about the Bush administration's behavior.

It was interesting to me, too, from the Ellis book and Adams biography especially, to learn how doubtful the country's founders were that their "experiment" in democracy would last.

One more thing: Jacoby mentions in Freethinkers that had our Constitution been ratified in 1798, instead of 1788, it's unlikely that such a godless document would have been approved. The Terror that followed the French Revolution of 1789 was viewed with horror by Americans, she says, who saw the bloodbath by French revolutionaries as a product of their "godlessness." And while certainly the power of the Vatican was under tremendous attack and the "papists" villainized in Revolutionary rhetoric and propaganda, I just discovered that Robespierre (shortly before losing his own head when the winds of public sentiment changed — sigh, oh where is our guillotine now that public sentiment towards our leader is changing?) named atheists as an even greater threat to the new French Republic than papists, and called for all atheists' heads to be basketed, too. If what Jacoby writes was true, apparently that news didn't make it to America's shores — or America's 18th-century religious leaders were equally good propagandists as their 20th- and 21st-century counterparts — and atheism remained the scapegoat for Americans' anti-Terror sentiments. Interesting, no?

Yes, The Godless Constitution is very good. Because of the constitutional and American history courses I took as an undergrad and the constitutional law courses in law school, I was familiar with this "territory." But I found out about this book when I heard the This American Life program, "Godless America," that featured an interview with Kramnick and the long set of excerpts from Julia's Letting Go of God.

Sometimes I wish that Kramnick and Moore's book had footnotes, and they acknowledge in "A Note on Sources" why they omitted them, and at least they provide references.

Another, breezier, book is "Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers" by Brooke Allen.

Finally, on church-state separation issues, I recommend Jefferson's "Notes on Virginia" and Madison's "Memorial and Remonstrance on Religious Assessments." The latter is available on-line here.

I agree that "Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers" is a lightweight but fairly good contender, the only similar book to "A Godless Constitution" that I've read.
The slender, unimposing volume is to the point, and this could entice the reluctant revisionist to at least look it over. But my lending it to several revisionist Christians left them unimpressed. Maybe they were just ashamedly reticent.
Gratefully, MM does have footnotes, which revisionist histories rarely have.
I felt that insufficient emphasis was placed on the religious horrors of the recent European history that the Founding Fathers were keenly seeking not to repeat and how the Enlightenment, the true provenance of our Constitution, gave them hope and resolve to form a better and great nation.
I'll have take a good look at "A Godless Constitution."

Kramnick and Moore's The Godless Constitution: a moral defense of the secular state is excellent.

Another good work is Religious Expression and the American Constitution by Franklyn S. Haiman. Haiman's work is annotated and includes appendices with a number of historical documents for reference.

A couple of quotes below from John Adams, via the Atlanta Freethought Society email group and courtesy of Ed Buckner, president of American Atheists).
Also mentioned on the AFS list was the idea that we secularists should celebrate June 10 as "Treaty of Tripoli Day."


The United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the first example
of governments erected on the simple principles of nature; and if men
are now sufficiently enlightened to disabuse themselves of artifice,
imposture, hypocrisy, and super-stition, they will consider this event
as an era in their history. Although the detail of the formation of the
American governments is at present little known or regarded either in
Europe or in America, it may hereafter become an object of curiosity.
It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service
had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the influence
of Heaven, more than those at work upon ships or houses, or laboring in
merchandise or agri-culture; it will forever be acknowledged that
these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the
senses.… (John Adams, “A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of
the United States of America” [1787-1788]; from Adrienne Koch, ed.,
The American Enlight-enment: The Shaping of the American Experiment and
a Free Society, New York: George Braziller, 1965, p. 258.)

We think ourselves possessed, or, at least, we boast that we are so,
of liberty of conscience on all subjects, and of the right of free
inquiry and private judgment in all cases, and yet how far are we from
these exalted privileges in fact! There exists, I believe, throughout
the whole Christian world, a law which makes it blasphemy to deny or
doubt the divine inspiration of all the books of the Old and New
Testaments, from Genesis to Revelations. In most countries of Europe it
is punished by fire at the stake, or the rack, or the wheel. In England
itself it is punished by boring through the tongue with a red-hot
poker. In America it is not better; even in our own Massachusetts,
which I believe, upon the whole, is as temperate and moderate in
religious zeal as most of the States, a law was made in the latter end
of the last century, repealing the cruel punishments of the former
laws, but substituting fine and imprisonment upon all those blasphemers
upon any book of the Old Testament or New. Now, what free inquiry, when
a writer must surely encounter the risk of fine or imprisonment for
adducing any argument for investigating into the divine authority of
those books? Who would run the risk of translating Dupuis? But I
cannot enlarge upon this subject, though I have it much at heart. I
think such laws a great embarrassment, great obstructions to the
improvement of the human mind. Books that cannot bear examination,
certainly ought not to be established as divine inspiration by penal
laws. It is true, few persons appear desirous to put such laws in
execution, and it is also true that some few persons are hardy enough
to venture to depart from them. But as long as they continue in force
as laws, the human mind must make an awkward and clumsy progress in its
investigations. I wish they were repealed. The substance and essence of
Christianity, as I understand it, is eternal and unchangeable, and will
bear examination forever, but it has been mixed with extraneous
ingredients, which I think will not bear examination, and they ought to
be separated. Adieu. (John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson, January
23, 1825. Adams was 90, Jefferson 81 at the time; both died on July 4th
of the following year, on the 50th anniversary of the signing of the
Declaration of Independence. From Adrienne Koch, ed., The American
Enlightenment: The Shaping of the American Experiment and a Free
Society, New York: George Braziller, 1965, p. 234.)


Obviously Adams recognized that that religious zeal and real democracy are antagonists.
Also, I sure hope my brain, or any other organ for that matter, is as vital as was Adams's at age 90!

Another book that I have not taken time to look for, but which is very well-researched and full of footnotes, is Chris Rodda's Liars for Jesus. She is an impressively self-taught student of American Constitutional history (as well as a high-school dropout), and she wrote the book as a specific antidote to the sloppy, intellectually dishonest writings of Christian revisionsists such as David Barton. I'm told that Rodda's book covers much the same territory as Kramnick and Moore's, only where they intentionally omitted true footnotes, Rodda decided to bury Barton with her footnotes.

It was Rodda's dogged, meticulous debunking that led to the defeat , back in 2008, of the scary / riduculous House Resolution 888, which if it had passed would have amounted to a Congressional finding of "facts" about the American system of government and laws on the Christian religion and the Bible.