Book Review: The Faiths Of The Founding Fathers

The Faiths of the Founding Fathers is a slim book and one that sticks closely to the subject described by its title. After a condensed and slightly disorganised opening outlining the religious context in the American colonies in 1770, the main substance of the book is a chapter-by-chapter description of the religious practices and views of Benjamin Franklin and the first five Presidents of the United States. David Holmes sticks scrupulously to the available evidence and draws from it fair and balanced assessments of the degree to which each of these men was a practicing and believing Christian. Although the chapters may be usefully read for supplementary information regarding their subjects, they are in truth descriptive rather than analytical and add little that cannot be found in a decent biography of each man. Sadly the book does not discuss the Constitution or the first amendment in relation to the founders’ faiths, and neither does it discuss the interaction between their religious views and their political actions.

In the final third of the book David Holmes covers two subjects on which he offers more analysis. The first is his discussion of the faiths of the wives and daughters of the founding fathers. Again we are treated to a schematic description of a selection of individuals’ religious views and experiences. However in this case Holmes is prepared to synthesise the data that he has gathered and observes that these women ‘were significantly more orthodox in [Christian] religious belief than the men’ (p. 109). Holmes says that this has not been satisfactorily explained, but goes on to offer six factors he regards as significant, and they combine to form an explanation that is both cogent and convincing.

The final contribution this book makes is in its survey of the faiths of the Presidents of the modern era, from Kennedy to George W. Bush. Here again, because Holmes steps outside the strict remit of his title, there is more academic room for manoeuvre, and this allows him to make interesting points about the Presidency as a modern institution and the way it has been moulded by each of its recent incumbents. In addition, it enables him to underline the political point of his moderate and descriptive book. The book has been written as a corrective to the growing nationalist mythology of the religious right in the United States, which tends to reinterpret history in the light of its own emergence, and sees the past of the United States as an unbroken stream of Christian continuity from Plymouth Rock to today’s Bible Belt. This evangelical version of U.S. history has had some difficulty with the Constitutional separation of church and state as well as with the Deistic and Unitarian views of some of the nation’s founding fathers, and has tended to reinterpret the establishment of the United States in the light of its own assumed link between American patriotism and Christian faith. In this context it has become important to describe the faiths (or the lack thereof) of the founding fathers clearly and moderately, and this is the contribution that David Holmes’ book succeeds in making.