The Founders and the Bible by Carl J. Richard

Abstract

Founders and the Bible. By Carl J. Richard. (Lanham, Md., and other cities: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016. Pp. x, 385. $42.00, ISBN 978-1-4422-5464-0.) Carl J. Richard makes an interesting move at the beginning of this study of the Bible in the writings of the American revolutionaries: rather than rely on the very famous Founders (George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin), he instead widens the circle to about thirty fairly orthodox founders, including John Witherspoon, Elias Boudinot, Benjamin Rush, and others (p. 2). Why not take these men (and they are all men) and examine their reading of the Bible to ascertain what the Founders thought about religion? That is a nifty idea, and a full discussion of the thoughts of a collection of less-prominent Founders would make for a thoughtful book. Unfortunately, Richard almost immediately claims that many of the Founders were orthodox Christians as opposed to Deists, as though such positions were mutually exclusive. Soon thereafter Richard casually suggests that the Founders were also all abolitionists, led on by that same Christian faith. Audacity can be a virtue, but claims like these are so out of tune with current historiographical thinking that they would each require their own volume (if not several). Moreover, Richard takes the copious references by the Founders as an acknowledgment of a uniform norm. Traditional Protestant positions on the Bible as elucidated by some Founders are paired with much vaguer moral or religious statements by other Patriots to create the illusion of a standard biblical outlook. Consider Richard's discussion of the afterlife; he writes, The doctrine of the afterlife provided the founders with priceless comfort (p. 229). John Jay, for example, consulted 1 Corinthians 15--Paul's explanation of Christ's atonement--when his wife died. Richard then also cites James Madison's and Benjamin Franklin's references to what the former termed 'a future State' as another case of a biblical argument by the Founders (p. 225). Those are radically divergent ideas of heaven, but Richard passes over the differences. This book seemingly assumes that since the idea of an afterlife is found in the New Testament, all ideas concerning an afterlife are therefore biblical, and thus, the Founders were thinkers. Elsewhere, Richard undertakes to prove the Founders' passion for the Bible by citing Charles Cotesworth Pinckney's participation in the Bible Society of Charleston. …