After watching Ken Burns’s new documentary The American Revolution, I was tempted to riff on the old Henry Ford quip that its history is “more or less bunk.” But the quip risks obscuring more than it reveals, for the documentary does indeed have a lot of excellent history that correctly states most of the facts with the polished presentation characteristic of Burns’s documentaries. Still, this makes its historical sins of commission and omission, particularly with regard to the religious beliefs of the founders, all the more insidious.
According to Burns (and co-directors Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt), the “most influential creators of the United States” were deists. By deistic belief, Burns means that they believed in a “supreme being, but one who did not interfere in the affairs of men or distinguish between faiths,” including, Burns suggests, between Christianity and Islam. And, therefore, the founders’ architectonic virtue was tolerance. Burns does not tell us which founders specifically he has in mind, but the context suggests at least Adams, Franklin, and Jefferson.
Burns’s characterization of these “A-list” founders is wildly misleading. It is admittedly true that these A-list founders in particular were enamored by the Enlightenment and gave expression to opinions that Christianity would consider heterodox. For example, Adams, Franklin, and Jefferson either implicitly or explicitly called the Trinity and the divinity of Christ into question. But none of them were radical deists, a tradition that denied God’s providence and the immortality of the soul, which can be traced to radical English deists like Charles Blount and Anthony Collins. Moreover, the English deists were a broad and diverse group that included more moderate deists like Matthew Tindale, who affirmed God’s providence and the immortality of the human soul.
The A-list founders decidedly rejected radical deism, including the idea that God is like a clockmaker who wound up the universe, set it in motion to do its thing according to mechanical laws, washed his hands, and went to sit down for a cup of coffee. On the contrary, each of them were providentialist theists who clearly affirmed God’s omnipotence and particular providential governance of men. Jefferson remarked,
Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever.
The entire point of Jefferson’s remark was that the persistent and evil institution of slavery generated a likelihood of revolt by mere natural causes-but it was even more probable to draw God’s “supernatural interference” to bring about justice.
<book.wordonfire.org/the-story-of-all-stories> As for Franklin, while his youthful exploits included deistical essays like “A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity,” with age came wisdom. He came to disavow that youthful work. And at the Constitutional Convention, he famously called for prayer, remembering the various times he and his fellow patriots had discerned God’s providential aid during the revolution. Franklin’s call for prayer manifests a belief in God’s superintending providence, not only during the Revolutionary War but as the framers deliberated about the new Constitution:
In this situation of this Assembly, groping as it were in the dark to find political truth, and scarce able to distinguish it when presented to us, how has it happened, Sir, that we have not hitherto once thought of humbly applying to the Father of lights to illuminate our understandings? In the beginning of the Contest with G. Britain, when we were sensible of danger we had daily prayer in this room for the divine protection. Our prayers, Sir, were heard, and they were graciously answered. All of us who were engaged in the struggle must have observed frequent instances of a Superintending providence in our favor. To that kind providence we owe this happy opportunity of consulting in peace on the means of establishing our future national felicity. And have we now forgotten that powerful friend? I have lived, Sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth-that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without his aid? We have been assured, Sir, in the sacred writings, that “except the Lord build the House they labour in vain that build it.” I firmly believe this; and I also believe that without his concurring aid we shall succeed in this political building no better than the Builders of Babel.
It is of course apparent that Franklin’s appeal to God had a forensic aim: to get the squabbling delegates to set aside prejudicial interests and broaden their minds to find a compromise at the impasse over representation (which they did shortly thereafter, in the famous Great Compromise). But it is a juvenile error to suggest that just because Franklin thought his speech would be useful entails that he didn’t also think it was true.
Throughout the war, the founders understood the ebb and flow of events under the wings of God’s providential governance. For example, when the patriots’ invasion of Canada in the winter of 1775 and assault on Quebec City failed, and hundreds of Americans were killed or captured in part due to the disabling effects of smallpox, John Adams wrote to Abigail that
if it had not been for a Misfortune, which could not be foreseen, and perhaps could not have been prevented, I mean the Prevalence of the small Pox among our Troops. This fatal Pestilence compleated [sic] our Destruction. It is a Frown of Providence upon Us, which We ought to lay to heart.
God did not intend the Americans to conquer Canada, in other words. But later events suggested to the players involved that God was orchestrating events in favor of American independence. And here is where Burns’s sin of commission in propagating the deist myth is compounded by a glaring sin of omission. In the self-same episode in which Burns claims the founders were clockmaker deists, he fails to discuss how the American diplomats in Paris interpreted events in providentialist terms.
The French were waiting to see if the Americans had what it took to stand up to Britain. In the fall of 1777, at the Battle of Saratoga, they proved themselves with a stunning victory and captured about 6,000 British troops. Writing to Franklin with the news, Reverend Dr. Samuel Cooper remarked that “divine Providence has supported and sav’d us in Ways we little thought of.” Indeed, American diplomat and forgotten founder Silas Deane had been conspiring with French ally Pierre de Beaumarchais to smuggle badly needed material out of France to the Continental Army, and some of that material had helped arm the Americans at Saratoga.
With the Saratoga victory in hand, Deane argued to the king’s foreign minister, the Count de Vergennes, that the time was right to formally consummate the Franco-American alliance. He framed his argument in providentialist terms:
It has been so ordered by the Power which invisibly governs & directs human Events, that the command & direction of these probable as well as possible Events should be committed to France.
It wasn’t just the Americans who interpreted events in light of higher causation. The extravagant and not-particularly-pious aristocrat Beaumarchais believed that God whispered in his ear “that the King will not let such auspicious events be marred by a total desertion from the true friends of America.” Vergennes and King Louis XVI were persuaded. The Americans and French signed treaties of commercial and military alliance on February 6, 1778. Reflecting on their diplomatic achievement, Franklin wrote to Josiah Quincy:
It is with great Sincerity I join you in acknowledging and admiring the Dispensations of Providence in our Favour. America has only to be thankful and to persevere. God will finish his Work, and establish their Freedom: And the Lovers of Liberty will flock, from all Parts of Europe with their Fortunes to participate with us of that Freedom, as soon as the Peace is restored.
Following the surrender at Yorktown, Congress issued a proclamation of thanksgiving to God, in which they expressed their belief that the Lord had bestowed his favor upon the Americans. They declared that “the influence of divine Providence may be clearly perceived in many signal instances, of which we mention but a few.” Among those they identified was “raising up for us a powerful and generous ally, in one of the first of the European powers.”
Doubtless, the abstract unlikelihood of a Catholic monarchy allying with a predominantly Protestant republic against its Protestant king-only a few generations removed from that kingdom’s ouster of its legitimate Catholic sovereign-sharpened the Franco-American conviction of the divine orchestration of events.
Needless to say, the founders would be amused to hear that the divine legislator of natural rights to whom they appealed in the Declaration did “not distinguish between faiths,” as if all faiths were equally supportive of the basic intrinsic dignity of persons that lay at the cornerstone of the Judeo-Christian faith and the Declaration of Independence. If divine indifference were true, then why did Franklin think clear teaching of history would demonstrate to Pennsylvania youth “the Excellency of the Christian Religion above all others ancient or modern”? And then why didn’t Thomas Jefferson believe God required tolerance of the Tripolitan diplomat Abd al-Rahman and his radical Islamic belief that “all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, & to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners” including otherwise innocent American shipmen? I had thought Jefferson had prosecuted a campaign in the Barbary Wars to decimate the North African Muslim pirate fiefdoms with such success that Pope Pius VII <www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/barbary-wars> praised the United States’ navy as having “done more to humble and humiliate the anti-Christian barbarians . . . than all the European states had done for a long period of time.” Burns, et al., would have us believe that the A-list founders viewed God as indifferent in this conflict.
Perhaps if the film directors had decided to spend more than twenty minutes of their twelve-hour documentary on the Declaration of Independence and its philosophical and theological teachings, they would not have run into such errors.
Whether their errors of commission and omission were out of malice or ignorance I cannot say. But if it was ignorance, it is difficult not to regard the ignorance as culpable. Regardless, I suspect God views documentary filmmakers who distort their subject matter to downplay or deny his providential governance of the world similarly to how he regards the wicked who plot against the righteous: The Lord laughs (Psalm 37:13). As in all things, so in this too: Let us imitate our Lord.
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