Faith and the Founding Fathers

By: Adam Jortner, The Great Courses

Narrated by: Adam Jortner

Length: 5 hrs and 51 mins

Publisher's summary

What did the Founding Fathers think about religion? And why did a group of practicing Protestants create a republic with widespread religious liberty? The 12 lectures included in this fascinating course provide multi-layered insights into the vision, philosophies, politics, and deep-seated faith of these brilliant leaders - in their own time, in their own words.

Listeners will examine the unorthodox religious journeys of men like George Washington, Ben Franklin, Thomas Paine, and John Jay, as well as the profound and passionate faiths of John Adams, Patrick Henry, and Benjamin Rush. They’ll also explore the ways in which the Founders thought about mixing religion with political power, from establishing national fast days to disestablishing state churches.

Along the way, listeners will hear about the profound changes religious freedom created in America. The Faith and the Founding Fathers is the story of how liberty and religion wrestled with each other at the birth of the republic and created the forms and traditions of modern American religion.

Through these 12 lectures, listeners will come to fully understand the philosophies of the Founding Fathers as they:

• Investigate how religion responded to the American Revolution
• Travel back to pre-revolutionary American religion and encounter the renegades of the Great Awakening and the tenets of Puritans and Deists
• Learn how the American Revolution was influenced by the beliefs of everyone from John Adams to Charles Carroll
• Discover how religious liberty became enshrined as law
• Examine surprising effects of religious liberty that the Founding Fathers never anticipated, including the rise of new forms of Christianity and American revivalism
• Follow the rapid expansion of African American Christianity among both free and enslaved communities

Despite how far removed the faiths of the Founding Fathers are from us in the 21st century, Dr. Jortner’s explorations of their philosophies offer illuminating insights into modern politics, religious liberty, and the overarching role of religion in human civilization.

©2019 Audible Originals, LLC (P)2019 Audible Originals, LLC.

Highly recommended

Regardless of your political persuasion, "Faith and the Founding Fathers" is sure to be interesting, surprising and enlightening. I didn't have high hopes for this. It was just another The Great Courses book to add as I was grabbing some others. But it really exceeded my expectations.

The founding fathers had diverse opinions on religion. Many common stories turn out to be false. There's absolutely no reason to believe George Washington was kneeling in the snow, praying, at Valley Forge, for example. The views of the times were complicated and varied across different parts of what was going to become the US. Several religious groups had to struggle greatly in order to have any freedoms or respect as well - the way some were treated as quite shocking.

Our view of the relion of the founding fathers tends to be greatly oversimplified. It makes sense that the reality would be much messier - we only need to look at modern America to see how complicated different people's faiths can be, even when they say they follow the same religion.

This is the sort of history that should be taught in school. Again, I highly recommend this for everyone in the US.

Very enlightening.

Interesting and informative. Answers a lot of questions which are the basis of debate in the US today.

great information

really enjoyed this series. learned alot about the Founding Fathers and their religion and intent for America.

Interesting

I've never really been interested in religion and faith but thought I would give this a shot. It still kind of went over my head but there were a lot of good tidbits in there. Recommend for anyone who is interested in religion.

Great listen!

Really enjoyed the level headed look back at the founding fathers. Time lets us pretend now is the only time of disagreement but it’s human nature in the end.

Of Interest Even to International Audiences

Every sentence is a tidbit that leads listeners to want even more detail, potentially requiring thousands of hours of further narrative. This is a truly balanced and arguably unbiased treatment of a subject that could easily have been warped by a scholar with a personal agenda. It is of considerable interest even to those of us in the (British) Commonwealth of Nations.

Great book...

What a great book. Just an amazing history of not only the faith of the founders but the history surrounding the times.
I thoroughly enjoyed the reading. Great information. Actually, something like this should be in required history class for high school students.
Way more than the title implies.
Thank you.

Excellent

A simply superb presentation of early American religions and the creation of the U.S. Constitution. Jortner is a great speaker.

Great Lectures. Needlessly Ambiguous Conclusion.

“The Founders did not possess one religion, and they did not think alike, and they secured American independence and government nevertheless.” –Lecture 8

Throughout these 12 illuminating lectures, Professor Jortner labors mightily to wean those on the Left as well as the Right of the notion that our Founders were solidly Christian, wholly Deist, strictly Unitarian, unanimously Universalist, or secretly Atheist. The reality on the ground in late 18th and early 19th Century America was far too complex—and far too interesting—for any such reductive wishful thinking.

Having, through years of fairly extensive reading, realized the truth of Jortner’s thesis, this came as no surprise. Nevertheless, his breadth of knowledge, selection of telling details, intellectual honesty and forensic skills all conspire to make these lectures an engaging treat. Like any good historian, he warns against using the Founders’ views as bumper stickers in our contemporary culture war, instead putting them within the context of their own culture war, swayed by or contending against the religious ideas and enthusiasms of their specific moment in history.

After discussing the influence of religion on the Founders, Jortner details the influence of the Founders on religion in the young republic, especially the impact of disestablishment. As he notes, before the Revolution, the First Great Awakening divided denominations; after the Revolution, The Second Great Awakening created new ones.

Here and there one can detect the lofty smirk of the academic left. He never acknowledges that ideas of individual liberty and limited government could not have evolved in the West without our Judeo-Christian understanding of the human person. But he’s correct when he observes that the arguments on both sides of our culture war have been overstated; we were founded as neither an explicitly Christian or non-Christian nation. However, the opaque conclusion he draws from that fact (“nations are not to sacrifice their future happiness to ideas of historical justice”) just doesn’t tally with the lectures that precede it. Surely, given the evidence he has so expertly marshaled, it should be evident that, while the Founders did not build a government on Christian principles, they insisted on virtuous citizens as the only guarantee of the success of that government. And they understood religion—all religions—as the best guarantor of that virtue. He touches on this in passing, but it could have been the logical capstone of this course.

That said, if it didn’t come free with Audible Plus, this course would still be eminently credit-worthy.

A Short Survey from a Knowledgable Historian

A good read, fair and studious. Having just read "Nature's God" by Matthew Stewart, I was curious to see how these would compare. To my surprise, Dr Jortner mentions this book in the very first lecture, short-selling it with a brief mention about its focus on Ethan Allen, a radical philosopher-patriot for sure. Well, Stewart's book is much more than that, being also an inspection of the Spinozan ideologies hiding and not-hiding among the Founder's syncretic beliefs. Indeed, as we follow Dr Jortner through the lectures on Franklin and Washington, the Deism of the Founding Fathers is palpable, and Dr's Stewart and Jortner could not seem more agreeable.

But as Jortner begins to cover the more Orthodox founders, we understand his historian's need to lash himself to the mast, leaving the philosophical Stewart to plumb the depths of one particular harbor while we continue to scout all coasts.

In the end, I enjoyed spending time with both treatments, and appreciate Jortner's broad but uber-knowledgable caravel survey as an excellent companion to Stewart's submarine deep-dive.