John Adams lived to be over 90 years old (1735-1826); and in that long lifetime the influence of his religious upbringing on his character never diminished. He retained the Puritan virtues of duty, perseverance, integrity, and responsibility all through his life. The influence of Puritan theology on his beliefs, however, was more complex. He came to reject the doctrine of the Trinity, identifying himself as a Unitarian; and he did not accept the divinity of Christ, seeing Jesus as a moral teacher and guide. In this respect, his views were similar to those of Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson. But compared to them, Adams was unalterably pessimistic about the ability of human beings to improve themselves or their society through the use of reason.
The Need to Keep Church and State Separate
Adams recognized reason as the only sure guide to knowledge; but he also recognized, in a way that Paine and Jefferson seemed not to, that reason was easily overcome by passion – especially the passion evoked by religious fundamentalists. Adams lived in a time of widespread religious revival called the Second Great Awakening. This was a period of enormous growth among the Methodist and Baptist movements, and of the founding of new denominations such as the Seventh Day Adventists and the Latter Day Saints (Mormons). It was a period of evangelistic fervor, mass conversions, and attempts at moral reforms. It was also a period of growing religious intolerance, with newly enthusiastic believers attempting to silence anyone who did not share their particular enthusiasms.
Adams was disturbed by the growing religious strife in several states, and wrote in 1817 to Jefferson: “What a mercy it is that these People cannot whip and crop, and pillory and roast, as yet, in the U.S.! If they could they would.” Adams considered religious discord the most dangerous threat to public peace, and warned that demagogues could easily manipulate religious passion to serve their own ends. If religion and politics were allowed to mix, he wrote, they would create factions that would spread through all aspects of society: “Our Money, our Commerce, our Religion, our National and state Constitutions, even our Arts and Sciences, are so many seed Plotts of Division, Faction, Sedition and Rebellion. Every thing is transmuted into an Instrument of Electioneering.”
The Danger of Religious Fundamentalism
As he grew older, Adams became ever more pessimistic about the future. When Jefferson began planning for the establishment of a strictly secular institution of higher education (which eventually became the University of Virginia), Adams wished him success and expressed the hope that neither religious superstition nor political superstition would “blow up” his plans. “But,” he wrote, “the History of all Ages is against you.”
Under the heading of religious superstition, Adams included a good deal of the New Testament and most of the Old. Even as central a Christian doctrine as that of the Trinity he regarded as quite literally unbelievable: nature proves beyond all questioning “that two and one make three; and that one is not three; nor can three be one.” He derided a certain Nimrod Hughes, a “prophet” who predicted that one-third of the world’s people would be destroyed on a specific day in the very near future. “Instead of the most enlightened people,” he wrote, “I fear we Americans shall soon have the character of the silliest people under Heaven.”
Adams himself provided the best summary of his own religion. At the age of 80, he wrote that his extensive study of theology had made “no change in my moral or religious Creed, which has for 50 or 60 Years been contained in four short Words “Be just and good.” As he approached the end of his life, he acknowledged having no certainty about what, if anything, would follow. “This world,” he wrote, “is a mixture of the Sublime and the beautiful, the base and contemptible, the whimsical and ridiculous.... It is a Riddle and an Enigma.”
Source:
Allen, Brooke. Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006.
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