Week 6. Christianity and Republicanism

Universal Common Sense and Self-Evident

Truths

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1. Equality, Republicanism, and Christianity

a. Equality• American movement for independence was fueled by the ideology of universal equality.

• The ideology of equality stressed the ability of common people to elect representatives to the government.

• “Good republicans” had to believe in the common sense of the common people.

• Ordinary people may not have been as educated or as wise as gentlemen, but they were considered honest and sincere, qualities that were essential for the republic.

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• By the latter part of the eighteenth century, to be enlightened meant to believe in the natural equality of all men.

• All men, even men of different nations and races, were born equal and the difference between one people and another proceeds only from the differing opportunities of improvement.

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• As was declared in 1760, “White, red, or black; polished or unpolished, men are men.”

• That only education and cultivation separated one man from another became one of the most remarkable ideas of the eighteenth century.

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• John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) placed a radically new value on knowledge acquired through the senses rather than through reason.

• This gave a new significance to the capacities of ordinary people. Perhaps only a few were capable of reason and intellectual achievement, but all people were capable of receiving impressions through their senses.

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• While Thomas Jefferson doubted the intellectual abilities of blacks, he supposed that in their moral sense they were the equals of whites.

• It was obvious that reason was unequally distributed in people, but all persons, however humble and however uncultivated, had in their hearts a moral intuition that told them right from wrong.

• Some believed that educated gentlemen had no greater sense of right and wrong than plain uneducated people.

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• Enlightened eighteenth-century thinkers, such as Jefferson, believed that differences between people were created by experience, by the environment operating through people’s senses.

• But how could people control the environment? Something was needed to structure their chaotic experiences.

• To build a functioning society something had to tie people together intuitively and naturally.

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• Jefferson and other American leaders modified their Lockean environmentalism by positing a moral instinct in each human being.

• Such a natural gyroscope identified with Scottish common sense philosophy was needed to keep individuals equal and adequately sociable in a confused and chaotic world.

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• The common-sense philosophy asserted that humans could know truth about the world outside their minds.

• People possessed universal (or “common”) experience (or “sense”). They presupposed basic realities such as the existence of the external world and the connection between causes and effects.

• Also the majority of human beings throughout the world presupposed a God who would one day judge good and evil.

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Americans found the Scottish philosophy useful in three ways: (1) for justifying the Revolution against Britain, (2) for outlining new principles of social order in the absence of the stability of British rule, and (3) for reestablishing the truths of Christianity in the absence of an established church.

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b. Republicanism and Christianity• For many American Christians, republicanism represented a political recognition of the ongoing struggle between Christ (who promoted true liberty) and Satan (who represented the worst possible tyranny).

• For them, republican principles expressed Christian values and should be defended by true believers.

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• The republican and the Puritan traditions both recognized the human capacity for evil as well as for good.

• Puritans emphasized the natural tendency toward evil as a consequence of Adam’s fall.

• Republicans emphasized the natural tendency to abuse official power as a consequence of the corrupting nature of power itself.

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• Puritans and republicans also defined virtue, freedom, and social well being in similar terms.

• Both saw virtue primarily as a negative quality; Puritans as the absence of sin, republicans as the absence of corrupt and arbitrary power.

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• Puritans looked on freedom as liberation from sin, republicans as liberation from tyranny.

• Puritans defined a good society as one in which sin was defeated and in which people were on guard against its reappearance.

• Republicans defined a good society as one in which freedom from tyranny was preserved and in which citizens resolutely resisted any tendencies toward the corruption of power.

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• Republicans and Puritans shared a common view of history. Both regarded the past as a cosmic struggle between good and evil.

• To American Christians good and evil were represented by Christ and anti-Christ; to republicans, by liberty and tyranny.

• Both republicans and Puritans anticipated a new age of righteousness and freedom. Both hoped that the Revolution would play a role in bringing this golden age.

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• Christian and republican ideas grew closer during the French and Indian War (1755-1763).

• To British colonists the French represented the essence of evil both because they accepted absolute monarchy and because they supported the Roman Catholic Church.

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• However, when the British Parliament began to tighten its control of the colonies, a shift in interpretation occurred:

• Tyranny promoted by Parliament and the Church of England replaced the tyranny represented by France and Roman Catholicism. 17

• During the period of evangelical revivals, Americans had faced important individual choices about their religious beliefs and loyalties.

• That experience may have prepared them to make decisions about their political beliefs and loyalties.

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• Many colonists who converted during the Great Awakening had disregarded traditional authorities in favor of their new religious convictions.

• They recognized the importance of self-determination through questioning the existing hierarchies of deference and privilege. 19

• A new rhetoric undermined the authority of the established social order.

• The colonists thought of religious and civil liberty as connected; John Adams's couples the canon and feudal law as the common enemy of freedom.

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• The founders were united in what John Adams called the general principles of Christianity: the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount.

• Jefferson and Franklin praised Jesus for his "universal philanthrophy.”

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• Jefferson’s Jesus was a republican. He was a reformer of Judaism as well as a moral teacher who spread the gospel of liberty, fraternity, and equality.

• While Moses had worshiped a cruel, capricious, and unjust deity, Jeffersonian Jesus worshiped a God of wisdom, justice, and goodness.

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• Jesus rejected the elitism of the chosen people. He demanded that we offer our love to all mankind as one family under the bonds of love, charity, peace, common wants, and common aids.

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2. Thomas Paine and Common Sense

• Thomas Paine’s Common Sense is an example of how deeply politics and religion were intertwined for the American revolutionary generation.

• Paine uses religious appeals to move his American audience to political action.

• He asserts that all kings are blasphemous usurpers who claim a sovereign authority over other human beings, which belongs only to God.

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• Paine insists that the Jews of the Old Testament rejected monarchical government implying that God’s new “chosen people” in America should follow that example.

• “For God’s sake, let us come to a final separation. The birthday of a new world is at hand.” Now Americans were involved not simply in a defense of their own rights, but in a worldwide struggle for the salvation of liberty.

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• Paine and Founders wrote for different audiences. That explains the different tone of their writings.

• The politicians, such as Adams and Jefferson, spoke and wrote for one another and for other rational, enlightened, audiences of educated men like themselves.

• Their works were stylized by rhetorical rules and were usually filled with Latin quotations and classical citations to the literature of Western culture.

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• Paine’s writings deliberately rejected the traditional apparatus of persuasion.

• He was determined to reach a wide audience by expressing feelings that the existing conventions of writing would not allow.

• He used simple, direct metaphors and relied on his readers knowing only the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer.

• Paine appealed to honesty, sincerity, and the natural feelings of the common people, who previously had not been involved in politics.

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• Paine spoke with an anger that none of the founding fathers ever expressed.

• His resentment was shared by many common people in these years – artisans, shopkeepers, traders, petty merchants. These people were tired of being scorned and held in contempt by a monarchical and aristocratic world.

• The other revolutionary writers, on the other hand, belonged to the gentry educated in Harvard or Princeton and could not really represent the outrage of the majority.

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• Common Sense represented a tradition of radical republicanism, which was deeper, bitter, and also more modern than the balanced and reasonable classical republicanism of most of the Founders.

• Some of the revolutionary leaders were uneasy over the anger that Paine was stirring up among common public. But they themselves spoke in the name of the people and couldn’t resist the popular language Paine used.

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• The popularity and power of Common Sense derived from the universality of Paine’s language that would soon be found in the Declaration of Independence.

• Paine saw the resistance to the king and Parliament as part of a world-historical struggle against tyranny. He believed that America could be an “asylum” for liberty.

• In Paine’s mind, history represented an effort to find a secure haven against tyrants bent on depriving people of their rights.

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• Common Sense became the central text of the resistance movement.

• Paine attacked the idea of inherited authority.

• He recognized that the American rebels perceived themselves as making history on a world stage.

• He urged independence as the only reasonable response to the tyranny of the king.

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• Paine’s critics included loyalists who resented his attacks on the king, as well as John Adams, who thought that Paine was capable of recommending the destruction of systems but failed to provide reasonable alternatives.

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• The Declaration of Independence is a profound expression of Enlightenment ideals “that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness”

• These “truths” seemed “self-evident,” even to eighteenth century Americans divided by distinctions of status and confronted with the obvious contradiction of black slavery.

3. Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence

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• The Declaration of Independence set forth a philosophy of human rights that could be applied not only to America but also to peoples everywhere.

• It was essential in giving the American Revolution a universal appeal.

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• The struggle for independence can be considered as a localist grassroots opposition to far-removed central authorities. It was a recurring theme in English history as it would continue to be in American history.

• Such opposition stretched back at least to the early seventeenth century, to the Puritan opposition to the established church and the royal court.

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• The English Civil War was in part an uprising of the local gentry, the “country” of England, against the “court” surrounding the Church of England and the king.

• Thus the American Revolution belongs to the English political tradition.

• Some historians see it as a conservative affair aiming not at creating new liberties but at preserving old ones.

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• Throughout the crisis, American political leaders insisted that they were rebelling not against the principles of the English constitution, but on behalf of them.

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• When Jefferson drafted The Declaration of Independence, the fact of independence was not yet an inevitable conclusion.

• Not all leaders of the resistance movement could accept the necessity or even the possibility of independence.

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• Jefferson knew that he would be perceived as a traitor to his king.

• He had to prove that the king had become a tyrant, thereby providing colonists with the ability and the duty to cut their ties to him.

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• The preamble of the Declaration explained why the colonies were declaring themselves independent.

• It included the statement of human rights and a theory of government.

• Specifically, it invoked the legacy of John Locke, who had described the duty of a free people to cut ties to a government that violated their interests.

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• The Declaration gave an expression to the Lockean idea that people need to give their consent to be governed.

• The end of the long preamble stated that it was necessary to submit the facts of the dispute to a “candid world.”

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• Most of the Declaration consisted of listing the crimes of George III.

• The Declaration defined the king as a tyrant who had committed a series of specific crimes against the American colonies.

• Among these crimes was the irresponsible way he dealt with the governance of the colonies.

• He was faulted, too, for suspending the operations of colonial legislative bodies that had spoken out against his abuses.

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• He kept standing armies in the colonies in time of peace.

• He quartered his troops among colonists.

• The Declaration also spelled out the king’s refusal to answer the petitions that colonists had sent, another sign that he was a “tyrant” who was “unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”

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• The Declaration didn’t offer any plan for a government or an effective way to organize a military campaign against England.

• Opponents feared that France might broker a deal with Britain and thus deprive the colonies of vital support during the war.

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• They didn’t believe that the excitement of the independence movement could be sustained.

• They also hoped that Britain could still redress the grievances.

• They argued that the Americans were unprepared for war.

• They claimed that there was insufficient agreement among the future states to form a single nation.

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• The Declaration of Independence clarified the core principles of separation and proved the impossibility of reconciliation.

• Each of the 13 colonies agreed to the terms of the Declaration.

• Such unanimity of thought had never before existed in the American colonies.

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