You might never suspect it, but Josh Hawley is a smart guy. He comes from a wealthy family and attended a tony private school where he was actually valedictorian. Then he was off to Stanford and finally on to Yale, where he was editor of the Yale Law Review. Like many of those who dominate the current Republican Party, Hawley’s loud and frequent ignorance about all things related to the Constitution, history, science, and reason is entirely feigned. It’s his way of playing to the groundlings down in the cheap seats, the people he secretly detests even as they hold him in slack-jawed reverence.
It’s not that he hasn’t always been a grade-A ass—even when he was back in that private school on his way to a safe admission at Stanford, where his mom was an alum, little Joshie was writing articles for his hometown paper about the evils of affirmative action. You can bet he did a happy dance last week to celebrate the Supreme Court ruling that will keep his alma mater whiter than ever. Hawley isn’t ignorant … except when it comes to empathy, kindness, and any form of concern for others.
So when Hawley starts posting nonsense about the religious faith of the Founding Fathers, co-mingling these ideas with white supremacy, as Laura Clawson reported on Wednesday, it’s not because he doesn’t know better. It’s because he is basically what every successful Republican is these days: a troll. Like any other troll who gets his jollies from causing disruption, Hawley has now doubled down on his disdain for the facts.
Ignoring him is what he really deserves. However, damn it, sometimes you really have to go troll hunting.
Hawley started off by providing something that he claimed was a Patrick Henry quote. It wasn’t. It was actually a quote from a white supremacist paper in the 1950s that Hawley helpfully—and surely knowingly—inserted in Henry’s two-centuries-dead mouth.
When people rightly tried to point this out, Hawley had a reaction that was just one mustache-stroking wha-ha-ha from making it clear just how much causing havoc was his plan all along.
John Quincy Adams was 9 years old at the time of the Declaration of Independence, so he clearly had exactly as much say in its writing as did anyone reading about it today. But then Hawley knew this as well.
Because this isn’t really a tweet about the religious basis of the country. It’s a tweet in which Hawley is bragging about his ability to work the audience. It’s also a fine demonstration of just how readily “the algorithm” behind a platform like Twitter plays into this vile game. Most social media platforms—Twitter under Elon Musk in particular—operate in an environment shorn of any sort of moral or ethical guidelines under which the most upsetting, controversial, and offensive statements are rewarded with greater attention … which appears to be the same algorithm now operating the Republican Party, making this kind of thing a perfect engine for people like Hawley.
If he’s not already fundraising off of this—with more emphasis on “owned the libs” than on his promotion of religion—there is little doubt he soon will be.
However, for the sake of providing a few spears that can be lobbed at those who may take Hawley’s deliberate misstatements as the truth, here are a few facts.
The founders of the United States had a wide range of religious beliefs. There were guys like Patrick Henry, who went around handing out Bible tracts and whose theology seems to have been something that would still be recognized as “evangelical Christian” today. There were guys like George Washington, who belonged to the Anglican Church but attended services at a variety of churches and was deliberately vague about endorsing any particular form of religious belief. There were a large number—including Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, Ethan Allen, and James Monroe—who styled themselves as Deist. To get a couple of Founding Mothers into the mix, Abigail Adams and Dolly Madison were also Deists.
The idea of Deism was very close to the idea of religion postulated by Aristotle when he talked about the “unmoved mover.” The universe existed, so clearly something had brought it into existence. Thomas Paine called that something “nature’s god” and said:
“I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and in endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy.”
Or, as Benjamin Franklin put it, when it comes to God:
“The most acceptable Service we can render to him, is doing good to his other Children.”
That kind of humanism was the pervasive theme of Deism, which grew out of the works of philosophers such as John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Jefferson might have summed it up when he said that he “subjected every religious tradition, including his own, to scientific scrutiny.” That included producing a famously edited down version of the Bible, which saw Jesus as a source of ethical guidance while deliberately cutting out the miracles and supernatural events (literally cutting them by taking a razor to a copy of the New Testament).
It’s amusing to think what kind of reaction might result if Fox News caught President Joe Biden hunched over a Bible, slicing it apart with a razor, saving just the parts he thought relevant. Oh, the tweets Hawley would make!
The biggest tragedy of the whole Age of Enlightenment might be that while the founders were scribbling their draft documents in 1776, it was less than a decade later that James Hutton, regarded as the father of modern geology, published “Concerning the System of the Earth, its Duration and Stability.” That work, for the first time, gave convincing evidence of what is now known as “deep time”—the idea that the Earth has been around a lot longer than 6,000 years.
It was Hutton’s extended time period that allowed others to fill the following decades with explanations of how everything from rocks to people were the result of processes that didn’t require any sort of divine kickoff.
When Jefferson and crew were writing, they invoked “the creator” or “the divine” or “the spirit” of this and that because they simply had no other options. So far as they were aware, there was neither the time nor the means by which the universe might have been produced sans magic wand.
But just because they invoked some vague ghost behind the machine doesn’t mean most of these guys bought into the story of Christianity, no matter how many times Hawley and others on the right lie about it. For example, here’s a Thomas Paine quote unlikely to show up in any Republican tweet:
“Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is none more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory in itself, than this thing called Christianity.” – Thomas Paine, Age of Reason
That the founders included such Bible-toting tract spreaders as Henry and such deeply disdainful skeptics as Paine shouldn’t be surprising. They were Americans, and Americans then, like Americans now, had a wide variety of beliefs.
The truth is that a diligent search by anyone seeking to find a founder who agrees with their own view can almost certainly find it, because those guys had a lot of very different views on religion. That includes Franklin, who just didn’t seem to think about it much, and who when religious friends told him he should study up and get himself “saved” near the end of his life, informed them that he didn’t think it was worth the bother as he would know the truth soon enough.
Just about the only thing this diverse group really agreed on when it came to religion was that they wanted to keep it out of their government. Their own experience with state religions of all types showed that religion was harmful to the state, and the state was harmful to religion.
This is why the only mentions of religion in the Constitution are in places where the founders went out, collected a set of 20-foot poles, and placed them firmly between any expression of religion and anything to do with the government. There’s not a Bible, a Jesus, or a GD God in the whole thing, much less any overt expression of Christianity. It is as secular a document as they could make it, expressly to protect their diversity of beliefs. And disbelief.
It’s also why when the ambassadors appointed by George Washington went off to Tripoli to negotiate the very first treaty in the history of the young nation, they came back with one that read, in part: “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”
Actually signing that treaty would fall to John Adams, because it took seven months to get back to the United States. Every official the returning ambassadors met kept wanting to stop them along the way so that they could sign the treaty. It was ratified by the Senate and signed by Adams in 1796. (Fun note: What Adams signed was a translation. The official version of the first U.S. treaty was written in Arabic.)
That’s America: A secular nation by design, made so by a group of people who realized that only a secular nation could protect their views on religion.
Now, finish your trolling and run away, Hawley. It’s what you’re really good at.
Mark Sumner
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