The non- religious origins of U.S. democracy

Nature’s God, The Heretical Origins of the American Republic by Matthew Stewart, Norton & Co., New York;  ISBN 978-0-393-06454-4 ©2014, $28.95, p. 435, plus Notes and Index

By Fred Reiss, Ed.D.

WINCHESTER, California — When I first read the title of Matthew Stewart’s newest book, Nature’s God, The Heretical Origins of the American Republic, I immediately thought of Miss Cerino’s third grade class in which she made her students memorize the first paragraph and a half the Declaration of Independence (this amounts to three really, really long sentences), whose second sentence includes the words “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God.” I admit to success at memorization, but back then it was pure rote. Did any of us understand the meaning of “Nature’s God?” God is just God.

Reaching deep into history, Stewart discovers that the first step toward the creation of our democratic form of government belongs to the Greek philosopher Epicurus. None of his books survive intact, most likely because of Christianity’s attempt to eradicate this philosophy. Rather, it is through the poet Lucretius (99 BCE – 55 BCE), who lived his life as an Epicurean that we know Epicureans believe in atoms as the building blocks of matter, accept that knowledge comes through the senses, and that one’s actions must be motivated by the pursuit of pleasure, which is accomplished not by eating, drinking, and making merry, but by such things as minimizing wants and rejecting God, a human invention created to instill fear, particularly about reward and punishment in an afterlife.

Stewart argues that finding a lost work of Lucretius, De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of the Universe), in 1147 by Giordano Bruno, who ultimately met his fate at a Roman Inquisition’s auto-de-fé for believing heretical thoughts, including the existence of life on other worlds, is “the pivotal link in the long chain of events that ended in the American Revolution.” A copy of this monumental work, according to Stewart, is to be found in the libraries of our founding fathers, such as Franklin and Jefferson. Many of the rank-and-file of the revolution, the hot-headed rebel rousers who dumped tea into Boston harbor, banded together into military organizations and secret societies, and formed correspondence committees were motivated by these same radical thoughts.

During the late seventeenth century, Epicurean ideas were being reworked by such philosophers as John Locke, whom many scholars assert is the ideological father of the American Revolution, and the “atheist Jew” Baruch Spinoza, from whom Locke “borrowed” much of his philosophy. Indeed, Spinoza’s political philosophy supports a democratic state, a representative form of government, and the separation of church and state. Spinoza abandoned Judaism as a consequence of being excommunicated by the Jewish community of Amsterdam in 1656, for espousing such ideas as maintaining that God and the natural world are one, and the world is governed by inalienable scientific laws. During the eighteenth century those holding Epicurean-like beliefs became known as infidels, atheists, and deists.

Stewart ties together these philosophers and their proposals with some of the early architects of the Revolution including, Ethan Allen, leader of the Green Mountain Boys and author of a voluminous anti-Christian book and the irreligious Dr. Thomas Young, member of the Boston Committee of Correspondence, the person who calmed the crowd the night after the Boston Massacre, and the only participant in the Boston Tea Party not to wear Indian regalia, explaining how they, along with others pre-war revolutionaries, arrived at and displayed their “heretical positions.” Stewart recounts, for example, that after the surprising victory at Fort Ticonderoga in May 1775, Bennington’s citizens met at the First Church to hear Rev. Jedediah Dewey’s sermon. Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys, heroes of the day, were there as well, “undoubtedly stretching themselves out in the back rows.” Dewey preached three times that credit for the victory belonged to God. Allen stood up and called out that the Parson must not forget that he was there, too. “Sit down, thou bold blasphemer,” replied the Reverend.

For some of the leaders of the Revolution, such as Franklin, Washington, Adams (Samuel and John), Jefferson, Madison, and Thomas Paine, author of The Age of Reason, a pamphlet rejecting the Christian Bible, God is like a clockmaker who designs and builds a watch, winds the mainspring, and goes away, knowing that the watch will run forever based on the dynamics between the jewels, gears, and springs. For them, God might have been the creator, but now He is only the “Laws of Nature.”

Stewart takes several chapters to review a number of important phrases from the Declaration of Independence, explaining the underlying philosophy and history, which led to their incorporation. These expressions include: “all men are created equal,” “that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” “that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” and “that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.”

In the eyes of the signers, these last two phrases do away with the deeply-rooted principle of the “divine right of kings,” replacing it with revolutionary ones: from now on, rulers rule by “the consent of the governed,” and if the government gets out of hand, “it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.”

Stewart observes that America established itself by revolting against the British crown. How then, he muses, could the founding of America be based on Christian ideas if the Apostle Paul said in Romans 13:1, “Every person is to be in subjection to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those which exist are established by God. Therefore whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment.”? But, Americans refused to be subjugated to the Crown, the governing authority, thereby establishing itself on at least one idea that runs counter to this long-held New Testament belief.

The Revolutionary War leaders, like all people, have a public persona and private lives. Today, the religious right uncritically invokes their public statements as proof of America’s Christian foundation. For example, Washington said, “To the distinguished character of patriot, it should be our highest glory to add the more distinguished character of Christian,” and John Adams said, “The general principles, on which the fathers achieved independence, were the only principles in which that beautiful assembly of young gentlemen could unite, and these principles only could be intended by them in their address, or by me in my answer. And what were these general principles? I answer, the general Principles of Christianity.” Were they invoking the divinity of Jesus, the worshiping of the trinity, the taking of communion, or just arguing in favor of some general form of ethics and morality? The words of the Declaration of Independence and their private correspondence give the answer.

Additionally, Jefferson, in 1804, literally put scalpel to biblical page, cutting out those verses from the New Testament that describe miracles, superstitious events, and the divinity of Jesus, leaving only those sentences of moral significance, and calling his finished Bible The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. But, more important than this, the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli, a peace treaty between America and the Bey and his Muslim subjects of Tripoli of the Barbary Coast, contains the phrase, “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion”.

Nature’s God is a deep and thorough philosophical and historical examination of the deeds and motivations of some of America’s pre-Revolutionary War’s political leaders who risked their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to ensure an enlightened and liberal foundation for their new nation. Nature’s God affirms that if anyone ever wants to know what a nation founded on atheism looks like, they need look no further than to the United States of America.

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Dr. Fred Reiss is a retired public and Hebrew school teacher and administrator. He is the author of The Standard Guide to the Jewish and Civil Calendars; Ancient Secrets of Creation: Sepher Yetzira, the Book that Started Kabbalah, Revealed; and a fiction book, Reclaiming the Messiah. The author can be reached via fred.reiss@sdjewishworld.com.