The American Founding
Christian Republicanism

Mark Noll is one of this country’s leading Christian thinkers. Formerly at Wheaton College, last year he succeeded George Marsden at Notre Dame. His vie of the founding of the republic consists of a complex mixture of politics and religion beyond the amalgam of Zuckert. He has outlined his views in an essay entitled “The Contingencies of Christian Republicanism”. In his account, there is a mixture of republicanism and liberalism, neither having hegemony. He acknowledges that the Puritan experiment of a godly commonwealth failed. He does not buy into the theory that the Puritan vision then merged with reason to make all sacred, including politics.

When the collapse of the Puritan government by revelation occurred, he opines that the republican promise of social order through virtuous public service came to the forefront in the colonies. When Puritanism’s experiment of a godly commonwealth expired the republican promise of social order through virtuous public service came to the fore in the colonies. For Noll:

The religious-political discourse of the revolution had joined classical republican themes of disinterested public service to late-Puritan themes of God-oriented public duty.

According to Noll republican themes of liberty were much more prevalent than Lockean themes of natural rights, social contract and individualism.

As the republic grew and expanded, however, it became a commercial juggernaut. It was then Lockean rights theory began to emerge. The Lockean impulse was connected to economics, not political theory. Noll, however, sees no antithesis that would cause revelation and reason to trump one another. Instead, there was a combination of liberalism, republicanism and religion in a complex, hard to explain, manner. Quoting Zuckert, Noll insists:

…both Locke and the ministers tended to treat natural and revealed law as two consistent, complimentary, and interdependent expression of a single divine will.

However, Noll and Zuckert are not on the same page. Where Noll differs from Zuckert is his emphasis on a strong Christian republicanism in the founding along with the Lockean impulse. Also, the arrangement was messier and more nuanced that Zuckert’s amalgam. Although we desire a neat and tidy explanation, the founding defies a clean, logical and analytical answer.

As one sorts through the different explanations, Noll’s analysis seems compelling. A mixture of Protestant faith and religion with secular reason and political freedom appears to be the recipe. Like grandma’s “pinch of this and pinch of that”, the quantity of the mixtures is not certain. Noll is convincing in his designation of the process as messy and contingent no matter how much we yearn for a high school textbook explanation.

And that is just what the conventional wisdom of the founding as solely and “Enlightenment project” is—sophomoric. At the founding, religion and faith were not abandoned. The founders believed religion was best as a matter of personal conscious. But, they also knew that religion and faith were integral to the new country. That is what Tocqueville found sixty years later. Thomas West was wrong to designate Locke as a Protestant theologian, but Lockean thought is not necessarily hostile to Christianity. Zuckert believes that Locke gave fledging Americans political ideas based on reason that

…were better resources for orienting themselves to the kingdom of this world than sectarian interpretations of scripture.

That seems to be good advice to us modern Christians who want to squeeze everything into a Scripture proof text. And, also to the secularist who wants to ban religion from the public square. To the founders, God spoke in two ways…revelation and reason…and both contributed to the birth of a nation.