Via Books and Culture:
Kidd debunks the notion that the founders sought to immunize American politics and public life against the influence of religion. Even Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, the early statesmen most habitually invoked by contemporary advocates of rigid church-state separation, would have recoiled at the dogmas promulgated by groups like the American Civil Liberties Union. Elements of secularist mythmaking, then, receive a solid thrashing, however politely administered. Nor, it should be added, does this unfailingly fair-minded book hesitate to puncture extravagant conservative claims about the Christian character of the American experiment. Kidd wisely refuses to portray the Revolution as a merely religious or merely political episode.
Points:
- “…five major precepts around which evangelicals, skeptics, and other Revolutionary compatriots coalesced: the campaign to disestablish state churches, the belief in a creator God who endowed all men with inalienable rights, the reality of human sinfulness, the corresponding need to foster private and public virtue, and the certainty of Providential governance over the affairs of mankind.”
- “Underpinning these individual ideals was a ferocious, all-encompassing devotion to the “sacred” ideal of liberty: Coercive religious establishments trampled on it; divinely anchored human rights safeguarded it from tyrannical abuses; restraints on sinful passion and exhortations to virtue slowed its descent into selfishness; and God, in his good judgment, might restore or rescind it based on a nation’s faithfulness, or lack thereof.”
- “Kidd’s epilogue ponders certain tensions and dangers within the Revolutionary mindset bequeathed to subsequent generations.”
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