John Adams and Founding Fathers Theology

This post comes from a lively and stimulating discussion I participated in recently. Many thanks to the insightful, intelligent, thoughtful and engaged individuals who shared that hour with me and helped push our consciousness forward.

John Adams was a seminal figure in American history. He was known for his quick temper. He was both a friend and enemy to Thomas Jefferson at different points in his life. He and Jefferson died within hours of each other precisely on July 4, 1826. He was perhaps more traditionally religious than many of the other founding fathers, although he favored the free thought variety as encapsulated in Congregationist and Unitarian traditions. However, he attended and respected other more conservative traditions as well.

Adams believed that any religion was better than no religion, but that none of them have all the truth. He did not believe in the divinity of Christ, nor many of the supernatural aspects of the bible, but was closer to the deist concepts that were gaining momentum during the time of the enlightenment period and in the environment of liberal reason in the colonies at that time. He was educated at Harvard, where deism was a strong undercurrent of theistic conception.

Many of the founding fathers were deists rather than traditional Christians. Their beliefs tended toward liberal free thought and were highly critical of the Catholic and perhaps conservative Protestant traditions. Adams was consistent in this regard. However, he showed a propensity to defend any form of religion when attacked by more extreme rationalists such as Thomas Paine.

Unitarians and Congregationalists were the dominant denonimations during the lifetime of Adams. Interestingly enough, the Baptists at one point came to the defense of Unitarians when they were being persecuted by other more Puritanical groups. This seems the reverse of what we'd expect in the modern United States.

Jefferson and Washington held similar beliefs to Adams. While Washington was extremely private regarding his theological concepts, he was known to quit going to a particular church once they wanted to require him to partake of communion. It is well-known that Jefferson rejected the Old Testament as well as the more supernatural and mythological aspects of the Bible. Jefferson even penned his own version of the New Testament, removing the miracles and retaining the core of Jesus's teachings.

Adams once remarked that the Sermon on the Mount and the Beatitudes contained all of his religion. This lean and focused theological approach is similar to Lincoln's, who once remarked that "when I do good, I feel good, when I do bad, I feel bad, that's my religion". How close is this to a recent popular song that offers "My religion is a smile on a dog".

How far have we come away from the liberal, thoughtful, free-thinking, open-minded mentality of many of the prominent founders of the United States? How do modern mega-churches with their simplistic sound bites, superficial scriptural interpretations and narrow intellectual sources compare to the quiet space where the true source is found? Were Adams and other enlightenment thinkers positive models we should understand better or is their brand of liberal reason only part of the whole that must include intuition, instinct and emotion as well?

We narrowly escaped becoming a theocracy, as many other voices during the time of our country's founding wanted to include language more specific to particular theological positions in the governing documents. We should be thankful that separation of church and state prevailed and we can be truly free to think, do and grow intellectually and spiritually (or not) as we are individually led.