The Hand of Providence
Ken Burns, Deism, and the American Revolution
Ken Burns and the other creators of the recent PBS documentary The American Revolution went great lengths to put their own spin on the American Founding. The first scenes of the documentary attribute the creation of the United States and its conception in liberty not to the Bible, nor the Ancients, nor English Common Law tradition, nor the Enlightenment. You’ve heard all those old claims before. No, the principles of representative democracy, of a constitutional republic, and of self-government were the inheritance of the Iroquois Confederacy, who practiced exactly none of those ideas, but to Burns and Co., deserve the credit all the same.
One claim that Burns makes in the film that is decidedly not original concerns the religious beliefs of the Founding Fathers. The documentary picks up and advances through the narrator’s voice the common argument that the most prominent of the Founders were not Christians but Deists, believing that the world was formed by a Supreme Being who has no subsequent involvement in the world. This Being is a moral one, so the purpose of man is to live virtuously. Therefore, no set of religious doctrines is more or less pleasing to the Being than another so long as it cultivates virtue and tolerance. While contributing historians on the film walk back the claim of radical Deism to a more balanced “Rational Theism,” the narrator’s words are decidedly more prominent. Furthermore, Ken Burns in his interview with Joe Rogan claims Deism for all the significant Founders, showing that the aim of his documentary is to solidify the Deism argument in the official narrative. In placing all the Founders in the same Deistic bucket, Burns and his colleagues overly generalize Deism, overly narrow Christianity, and ignore glaring evidence to the contrary in the attempt to divorce the American Founding from Christianity.
Mark David Hall has convincingly argued that there was only one true Deist among the Founders, namely, Thomas Paine who was only momentarily American. But even if Hall’s assessment is not adopted, the way that the documentary casts the Founders as uniformly Deist is problematic because Deism is not a uniform ideology with a fixed set of doctrines. To say that all or most of the “Deistic” Founders held to the same body of beliefs is misleading. The apologist and scholar of worldviews, James W. Sire, distinguishes between “cold” and “warm” deists. Cold deists rejected any instances of divine sovereignty or revelation from God to man, and were generally hostile to established religions. Thomas Paine, author of the influential revolutionary pamphlets Common Sense and The Crisis, falls squarely with the cold deists. He vehemently rejected the Bible as a revelation from God and called all organized religion mere human invention “set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.” This is the side of Deism portrayed in the PBS documentary and assigned to the Founders by Burns.
On the other side, warm deists like Benjamin Franklin acknowledged God’s governing of the world, and saw some benefit in prayer. It was Franklin who reminded the Constitutional Convention that “God governs in the affairs of men. If a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?” While both Paine and Franklin may be considered deists, there is a chasm between their worldviews, the one coldly and arrogantly denying the authority of God, the other humbly acknowledging it. Paine’s belief is closer to those of Karl Marx and Richard Dawkins than it is to Franklin’s. The makers of The American Revolution gloss right over this crucial difference and deceptively cast all the Founders as anti-God radicals like Paine. No investigation of, for example, a Roger Sherman or Oliver Ellsworth or John Witherspoon or Samuel Adams–pious Calvinists all–is made to counterbalance the Deistic caricature.
The second issue with the depiction of the Founders’ religious views is that the documentary narrows the definition of Christianity to exclude beliefs that would be classified as Christianity today. Thomas Jefferson and Franklin are both classified as Deists by Burns, yet both held views akin to a modern progressive Christian. Indeed, both are probably better understood as Unitarian Universalists.
Jefferson denied the deity of Christ and the authenticity of miracles, but honored Christ’s moral example and teachings as “the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man.” In the same letter, Jefferson describes how he edited his Bible “cutting verse by verse out of the printed book” to remove miracles and Christ’s claims to divinity. Franklin likewise, in answering a question from Yale president Ezra Stiles about his religious beliefs late in life, responded that he believed in “one God, creator of the universe,” who governs the world and deserves worship. Franklin went on to say Christ’s teachings were “the best the world ever saw, or is likely to see,” though he harbored “some doubts as to his divinity.” Franklin further affirms his belief in God’s inclusion of different faiths because God does not punish well-meaning unbelievers “with any particular marks of his displeasure.”
Both men fall well short of orthodox Christianity, but Burns should hardly be seen as taking a stand for doctrinal purity. Franklin’s and Jefferson’s views of Christ as being a moral teacher yet less than divine, of Scripture as holding moral philosophy but not authority, of the road to God being open to many faiths, and of the purpose of life to live with tolerance and virtue, sounds eerily similar to many progressive Christian theologies today.[11] To label them as something other than Christian would be dishonest because if they lived today, Christian is exactly what most people would call them.
Furthermore, it strikes of intellectual dishonesty from a scholarly standpoint to not call the Founders Christians because of divergent doctrines. While orthodox Christians would recognize the beliefs of Franklin and Jefferson as heretical, that has never stopped scholars from offering the label “Christian” to the heterodox of history. The early church heresy Arianism viewed Christ as a subordinate creation of God, not divine Himself. Nestorianism taught that Christ was of two separate natures, one human, one divine, that did not mix. The Ebionite sect taught that Christ was a normal human who lived a virtuous life and was thereby “adopted” as the Messiah by God. All of these beliefs, and many others, are rightly classified as aberrant doctrines, yet modern secular scholars do not hesitate to call them all Christianity, also claiming that today’s orthodox Christianity is simply the version that subverted the other strains, not the one that is true. It is inconsistent for scholars to suddenly adapt this practice when it comes to the American Founding, and to classify Franklin and Jefferson (who called himself an Ebionite Christian in a letter to John Adams) as anything other than Christian because they held heretical versions of Christianity.
As Burns states in the Rogan interview, the significant Founders believed that “there was a Supreme Being who was disinterested in the affairs of man, and did not distinguish between faiths.” If George Washington, the father of the nation, was a Deist, he wasn’t a very good one. A Deist like Burns describes would have no concept of an active Providence, nor a relationship between man and this God. Washington, however, sees the hand of Providence at every turn, gives glory to God, and sees an obligation to have faith in Him. Explaining his miraculous survival of the calamitous Battle of the Monongahela in the French and Indian War, during which he sustained four bullet holes through his jacket but none to his person, Washington wrote his brother John that by “the all-powerful dispensations of Providence, I have been protected beyond all human probability and expectation… altho’ death was levelling my companions on every side.”
For Washington, God orchestrated even the flight of the bullets in battle to achieve a greater purpose. In a letter after the Revolution to the German Lutheran congregation of Philadelphia, Washington pointed to “the same Providence which has been visible in every stage of our progress to this interesting crisis,” noting the improbable events woven together to bring about American independence. With this sovereign direction in mind, near the end of the Revolutionary War, Washington ascribed “the Glory and the Praise” to “Divine Providence” for the triumph of the Patriot cause. In the midst of the war, Washington wrote that “the hand of Providence has been so conspicuous in all this, that he must be worse than an infidel that lacks faith, and more than wicked, that has not gratitude enough to acknowledge his obligations.” Not only does God govern according to His will, but the only proper response to such sovereignty, as Washington points out, is worship. A Burns’ Deist would not believe in a providential God, nor give Him glory, nor acknowledge a debt of worship. In doing all three at various points in life, Washington shows himself to be a very poor Deist, but a rather normal 18th century Anglican Christian.
History is full of stubborn misconceptions that should be easily dispatched, yet hang on all the same. Columbus did not think the earth was flat. The Constitution’s Three-Fifths clause mandated that three out of every five slaves would be counted for representation and taxation, not that a slave was only 60% human. These are easy to refute, yet whether through ineptitude or malice, they persist. Ken Burns’ and his associates’ claims linking the most significant Founding Fathers with radical Deism is yet another of these overly simplistic assertions.
As the nation’s 250th birthday nears, the eyes of the country turn with renewed focus to its origin story, giving added significance to works like this one. What those eyes will see is the Burns and Co. recasting the Founding story in the DEI version. Given its other spurious claims, like that the Iroquois Confederacy inspired the Constitution, or that Islam was as much a part of the colonial culture as Christianity, The American Revolution and its repetition of the Deism distortion is not an earnest retelling of the Founding, but the latest assault on the American heritage, and an effort to break the last ties of American culture to Christianity.
Image: Washington the Soldier, an 1834 portrait of Washington on horseback during the Battle of the Monongahela. Wikimedia Commons.