Resistance to Tyrants, Obedience to God

Reason, Religion, and Republicanism at the American Founding

Edited by Dustin A. Gish and Daniel P. Klinghard - Contributions by Jeffrey A. Bernstein; Maura Jane Farrelly; Robert Faulkner; Matthew Holbreich; Jonathan Israel; Peter McNamara; Carla Mulford; Vincent Philip Muñoz; Danilo Petranovich; Eran Shalev and Aristide Tessitore

Both reason and religion have been acknowledged by scholars to have had a profound impact
on the foundation and formation of the American regime. But the significance, pervasiveness,
and depth of that impact have also been disputed. While many have approached the American
founding period with an interest in the influence of Enlightenment reason or Biblical religion,
they have often assumed such influences to be exclusive, irreconcilable, or contradictory. Few
scholarly works have sought to study the mutual influence of reason and religion as intertwined
strands shaping the American historical and political experience at its founding. The purpose of
the chapters in this volume, authored by a distinguished group of scholars in political science,
intellectual history, literature, and philosophy, is to examine how this mutual influence was
made manifest in the American Founding—especially in the writings, speeches, and thought of
critical figures (Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson,
James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Charles Carroll), and in later works by key interpreters of
the American Founding (Alexis de Tocqueville and Abraham Lincoln).

Taken as a whole, then, this volume does not attempt to explain away the potential opposition
between religion and reason in the American mind of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- centuries, but instead argues that there is a uniquely American perspective and political thought
that emerges from this tension. The chapters gathered here, individually and collectively, seek
to illuminate the animating affect of this tension on the political rhetoric, thought, and history
of the early American period. By taking seriously and exploring the mutual influence of these
two themes in creative tension, rather than seeing them as diametrically opposed or as mutually
exclusive, this volume thus reveals how the pervasiveness and resonance of Biblical narratives
and religion supported and infused Enlightened political discourse and action at the Founding,
thereby articulating the complementarity of reason and religion during this critical period.

Lexington Books

Pages: 276 • Trim: 6 x 9

978-0-7391-8219-2 • Hardback • August 2013 • $128.00 • (£98.00)

978-1-4985-1546-7 • Paperback • March 2015 • $57.99 • (£45.00)

978-0-7391-8220-8 • eBook • August 2013 • $55.00 • (£42.00)

Subjects: Political Science / American Government / National, Philosophy / Political, Political Science / History & Theory

Resistance to Tyrants, Obedience to God

Reason, Religion, and Republicanism at the American Founding

Hardback

Paperback

eBook

Summary

Both reason and religion have been acknowledged by scholars to have had a profound impact
on the foundation and formation of the American regime. But the significance, pervasiveness,
and depth of that impact have also been disputed. While many have approached the American
founding period with an interest in the influence of Enlightenment reason or Biblical religion,
they have often assumed such influences to be exclusive, irreconcilable, or contradictory. Few
scholarly works have sought to study the mutual influence of reason and religion as intertwined
strands shaping the American historical and political experience at its founding. The purpose of
the chapters in this volume, authored by a distinguished group of scholars in political science,
intellectual history, literature, and philosophy, is to examine how this mutual influence was
made manifest in the American Founding—especially in the writings, speeches, and thought of
critical figures (Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson,
James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Charles Carroll), and in later works by key interpreters of
the American Founding (Alexis de Tocqueville and Abraham Lincoln).

Taken as a whole, then, this volume does not attempt to explain away the potential opposition
between religion and reason in the American mind of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- centuries, but instead argues that there is a uniquely American perspective and political thought
that emerges from this tension. The chapters gathered here, individually and collectively, seek
to illuminate the animating affect of this tension on the political rhetoric, thought, and history
of the early American period. By taking seriously and exploring the mutual influence of these
two themes in creative tension, rather than seeing them as diametrically opposed or as mutually
exclusive, this volume thus reveals how the pervasiveness and resonance of Biblical narratives
and religion supported and infused Enlightened political discourse and action at the Founding,
thereby articulating the complementarity of reason and religion during this critical period.

Details

Lexington Books

Pages: 276 • Trim: 6 x 9

978-0-7391-8219-2 • Hardback • August 2013 • $128.00 • (£98.00)

978-1-4985-1546-7 • Paperback • March 2015 • $57.99 • (£45.00)

978-0-7391-8220-8 • eBook • August 2013 • $55.00 • (£42.00)

Subjects: Political Science / American Government / National, Philosophy / Political, Political Science / History & Theory

Author

Dustin Gish teaches ancient, early modern, and American constitutionalism in the Institute for the American Constitutional Heritage at the University of Oklahoma. He has published articles, book chapters, review essays, and reviews on topics in the history of political philosophy on the political thought of Homer, Xenophon, Plato, William Shakespeare, and Thomas Jefferson. His work has appeared in The Journal of Politics, History of Political Thought, Perspectives onPolitical Science, Polis, The Review of Politics, and Bryn Mawr Classical Review. He is also contributing co-editor of two volumes on Shakespeare’s political thought (Souls With Longing:Representations of Honor and Love in Shakespeare and Shakespeare and the Body Politic), and of The Political Thought of Xenophon.

Daniel Klinghard is associate professor of political science at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches American national government. He is the author of The Nationalization of American Political Parties, 1880-1896 (Cambridge University Press, 2010), which was awarded the Leon D. Epstein Outstanding Book Award by the Political Parties and Organizations section of the American Political Science Association. He has published in Presidential Studies Quarterly, Polity, and The Journal of Politics.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction

Chapter 1The Mutual Influence of Biblical Religion and Enlightenment Reason at the American Founding
Dustin Gish and Daniel Klinghard

Part I — Reason and Fait
Chapter 2: Faiths of Our Modern Fathers: Bacon’s Progressive Hope and Locke’s Liberal Christianity
Robert Faulkner
Chapter 3: The Radical Enlightenment’s Critique of the American Revolution
Jonathan Israel
Chapter 4: “Nature’s God” as Deus sive Natura: Spinoza, Jefferson, and the Historical Transmission of the Theological-Political Question
Jeffrey Bernstein

Part II — Biblical Rhetoric and Republicanism
Chapter 5: Benjamin Franklin, Virtue’s Ethics, and “Political Truth”
Carla Mulford
Chapter 6: Evil Counselors, Corrupt Traitors, and Bad Kings: The Hebrew Bible and Political Critique in Revolutionary America and Beyond

Eran Shalev
Chapter 7: Biblical Narratives and Enlightenment Methodology: Religion, Reason, and Republicanism in Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia
Dustin Gish and Daniel Klinghard

Part III — Religion and Politics
Chapter 8: Charles Carroll, the American Revolution, and Catholic Identity: Constitutional Discourses in Revolutionary Maryland
Maura Farrelly
Chapter 9: The Founding Founders’ Disagreements about Church and State
Vincent Philip Muñoz
Chapter 10: Alexander Hamilton, Religion, and American Conservatism
Peter McNamara

Part IV — Legacies
Chapter 11: In the Valley of the Dry Bones: Lincoln’s Biblical Oratory and the Coming of the Civil War
Danilo Petranovich and Matthew Holbreich
Chapter 12: Enlightenment Philosophy, Biblical Religion, and Tocqueville’s New Science of Politics
Aristide Tessitore
Contributors
Index

Reviews

Was America a city upon a hill, or was it just a skirmish in the larger battle between Ancients and Moderns? The essays in this volume reject these familiar alternatives and propose a third way. In so doing, they contribute to our growing understanding of the Enlightenment while at the same time forcing us to consider early American political thought in its own terms. Gish and Klinghard have put together a volume that should be essential reading for students of the early republic and for students of the Enlightenment.
— Jeremy D. Bailey, professor of political science, University of Houston