Faith and the Founding Fathers

By: Adam Jortner, The Great Courses

Narrated by: Adam Jortner

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.

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.

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.

Complex look at Rev War faith

Prof. Jortner conducts a fascinating and even-handed look at wide variety of religious beliefs among the US Founding Fathers. Although I thought I was relatively familiar with US history, this opened my eyes to the range of perspectives during the early years of our country.

Jortner also does a great discussing the limits of what we do and don't know about the beliefs of some of the individuals. I found the discussion of George Washington particularly interesting, and what we know and can infer from his avoidance of communion, for example.

I had vaguely thought that most or all of the framers were Deist, and it was compelling to learn that it was much more of a mixed bag. Although I assume that most listeners are Americans, this is well done and could be of interest to anyone interested in that period of history, or in religious history generally. I think this would work well for an advanced homeschooler, as well.

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.

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.

So much I never knew

A thorough and scholarly approach to this time in American history. I learned so much.