A Christian apologist finds a quotation from John Adams - and assumes it proves a point...
1 Background
A Christian apologist argues that religion is a mandatory requirement for democracy and uses a quotation from John Adams to support this idea. Here is the apologist argument:
“A Higher Moral Frame of Reference is almost a must for democracy to develop in the first place. This is stated in a quote from John Adams...”
"We have no government armed in power capable of contending in human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other."
It is obviously fallacious to assume that any argument is proven because one quote from one person appears to support it. Even if John Adams held the opinion that "A Higher Moral Frame of Reference is almost a must for democracy to develop" - that opinion is not necessarily fact. So we could just end the debate at that point. But in this case, it's worth examining for three reasons:
A) The quotation is actually two sentences joined together that were originally separated by a third sentence, which has been omitted for some reason.
B) The person being quoted – John Adams – certainly did not consider religion to be a requirement of democracy (the Apologist fails to notice the complete absence of the word "democracy" in the quote. More on Adams' opinion of democracy later).
C) John Adams was a Unitarian. What does this mean?
A The quote in context
The quote is selectively pulled from a letter John Adams wrote to the Militia of Massachusetts however, it is only a partial quote and omits some important words. Here's the full letter...
Message from John Adams to the Officers of the First Brigade of the Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts
Gentlemen, While our country remains untainted with the principles and manners which are now producing desolation in so many parts of the world; while she continues sincere, and incapable of insidious and impious policy, we shall have the strongest reason to rejoice in the local destination assigned us by Providence.
But should the people of American once become capable of that deep simulation towards one another, and towards foreign nations, which assumes the language of justice and moderation, while it is practising iniquity and extravagance, and displays in the most captivating manner the charming pictures of candour, frankness, and sincerity, while it is rioting in the rapine and insolence, this country will be the most miserable habitation in the world. Because we have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, and licentiousness would break the strongest cords of our Constitution, as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
An address from the officers commanding two thousand eight hundred men, consisting of such substantial citizens as are able and willing at their own expense completely to arm and clothe themselves in handsome uniforms, does honor to that division of the militia which has done so much honor to its country. Oaths in this country are as yet universally considered as sacred obligations. That which you have taken and so solemnly repeated on that venerable spot, is an ample pledge of your sincerity and devotion to your country and its government.
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So an entire sentence of Adams’ words has been left out of the quotation provided by Christian apologists. It is an important sentence. Adams uses “moral” and “religious” as synonyms and the missing sentence explains this. Adams does not mention ungodliness or democracy or blasphemy or atheism or “higher moral frames of reference” and so on. He is focusing on moral issues: avarice, ambition, revenge, etc.. Adams may have equated religion and morality, but he was of the opinion neither of those was “higher” or indeed divine or supernatural. It is clear that the letter (and similar letters from the militia to Adams) were discussing fidelity to country and government, not religion.
There is no mention of democracy at all. In his other writings, Adams made it very clear that Christianity was not the basis of the US constitution.
A2 The US Constitution is “wholly Inadequate”?
There is also a dangerous implication in assuming that the US Constitution is only applicable to religious people. The idea that US Citizens who are not religious are not protected by the constitution is patently false. Or should be!
Or if we take it literally, Adams is saying that the US Constitution is "wholly inadequate" for governing people who are not religious! Does this mean Adams was unaware of the 1st amendment? Unlikely...
A3 John Adams' Views on Democracy
What does John Adams have to say on the subject?
"You have rights antecedent to all earthly governments; rights that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws; rights derived from the Great Legislator of the Universe."
"Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There was never a democracy yet that did not commit suicide."
So it's strange that a Christian Apologist would quote Adams in order to defend his argument that religions "is almost a must for democracy to develop in the first place" when Adams said no such thing.
A4 It Gets Worse
The apologist then presents his own version of the quote...
"No government in any non-totalitarian society is--or could be--armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry would break the strongest cords of any Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Constitutions in such societies are designed only for a moral and religious people. They are and would be wholly inadequate for any other."
The first sentence implies that a Totalitarian Regime has the power to contend with human passions unbridled by morality and religion but the Constitution of the USA cannot. The second sentence replaces the word "licentiousness" which was used in Adams' letter, with the word "gallantry". It is unclear whether the apologist made this change himself or used the wrong source for the quote. In any case, it makes no sense. The final sentence reinforces the first sentence - implying the Constitution of the USA is inadequate for a population that is not religious, but a Totalitarian Regime is!
The apologist eventually realises that the word "gallantry" was was a mistake so he comes up with this...
"No government in any non-totalitarian society is--or could be--armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or pride would break the strongest cords of any Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Constitutions in such societies are designed only for a moral and religious people. They are and would be wholly inadequate for any other."
...which really isn't much better!
A6 Conclusion
What the apologist is trying to say is that democracy cannot succeed if the majority of the population are not religious. Why can't he just say that? Maybe because his opinion is easy to refute when it's stated in plain English. Whatever the reason, his argument for religion as the basis of successful democracy is based on a misquote from someone who died over 200 years ago and who was vehemently opposed to democracy!
B.1 - John Adams' Views on Religion and Religious Texts
Writing to Thomas Jefferson on December 12, 1816, Adams mentioned that he had devoted himself to theological study for “the last year or two” and listed more than 20 volumes of religious writing and history he had read:
“Romances all! I have learned nothing of importance to me, for they have made no change in my moral or religious creed, which has, for fifty or sixty years, been contained in four short words, “Be just and good.’ In this result they all agree with me.”
The conclusion Adams drew from his study of religious texts was what he referred to as “universal toleration.” Something that requires secular democracy.
John Adams – Quotes
"Major Greene this evening fell into some conversation with me about the Divinity and satisfaction of Jesus Christ. All the argument he advanced was, "that a mere creature or finite being could not make satisfaction to infinite justice for any crimes," and that "these things are very mysterious."
Thus mystery is made a convenient cover for absurdity.
Thus mystery is made a convenient cover for absurdity.
- Entry of 13 February 1756 in Charles Francis Adams, The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States: With a Life of the Author,Vol 2
"Where do we find a precept in the Gospel requiring Ecclesiastical Synods? Convocations? Councils? Decrees? Creeds? Confessions? Oaths? Subscriptions? and whole cart-loads of other trumpery that we find religion incumbered with in these days?"
- Diaries 18 February 1756)
"The question before the human race is, whether the God of nature shall govern the world by his own laws, or whether priests and kings shall rule it by fictitious miracles?
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- John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson, June 20, 1815
"The United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature; and if men are now sufficiently enlightened to disabuse themselves of artifice, imposture, hypocrisy, and superstition, they will consider this event as an era in their history. Although the detail of the formation of the American governments is at present little known or regarded either in Europe or in America, it may hereafter become an object of curiosity. It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the influence of Heaven, more than those at work upon ships or houses, or laboring in merchandise or agriculture; it will forever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses."
- John Adams, "A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America" (1787-88)
"Thirteen governments [of the original states] thus founded on the natural authority of the people alone, without a pretence of miracle or mystery, and which are destined to spread over the northern part of that whole quarter of the globe, are a great point gained in favor of the rights of mankind.
-- John Adams, "A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America" (1787-88)
-- John Adams, "A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America" (1787-88)
"When philosophic reason is clear and certain by intuition or necessary induction, no subsequent revelation supported by prophecies or miracles can supersede it.
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-- John Adams, from Rufus K Noyes, Views of Religion, quoted from from James A Haught, ed, 2000 Years of Disbelief
"I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved - the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced!
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--John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson, from George Seldes, The Great Quotations
"Of all the nonsense and delusion which had ever passed through the mind of man, none had ever been more extravagant than the notions of absolutions, indelible characters, uninterrupted successions, and the rest of those fantastical ideas, derived from the canon law, which had thrown such a glare of mystery, sanctity, reverence, and right reverend eminence and holiness around the idea of a priest as no mortal could deserve ... the ridiculous fancies of sanctified effluvia from episcopal fingers.
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--John Adams, "A Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law," printed in the Boston Gazette, August 1765
B.3 - John Adams' Religious Beliefs
Adams was raised a Congregationalist, but ultimately rejected many fundamental doctrines of conventional Christianity, such as the Trinity and the divinity of Jesus, becoming a Unitarian. In his youth, Adams' father urged him to become a minister, but Adams refused, considering the practice of law to be a more noble calling. Although he once referred to himself as a "church going animal," Adams' view of religion overall was rather ambivalent: He recognized the abuses, large and small, that religious belief lends itself to, but he also believed that religion could be a force for good in individual lives and in society at large. His extensive reading (especially in the classics), led him to believe that this view applied not only to Christianity, but to all religions. Adams was aware of (and wary of) the risks, such as persecution of minorities and the temptation to wage holy wars, that an established religion poses. Nonetheless, he believed that religion, by uniting and morally guiding the people, had a role in public life.
C - John Adams the Unitarian
Some Christian apologists portray Adams as a Christian when he was in fact a Unitarian.
According to Holley Ulbrichs, author of The Fellowship Movement, and member of the Universalist Unitarian church, Unitarians never believed in the Trinity. She explains...
In 1819 William Ellery Channing preached a famous sermon in Baltimore at the ordination of Rev. Jared Sparks. The title of his sermon was “Unitarian Christianity.” That brought to a head an ongoing battle between the religious liberals and the religious conservatives in the Congregational Church, of which John Adams was a member, but on the liberal side. The American Unitarian Conference, later Association, came into being in 1825, a year before his death (and Thomas Jefferson’s), but both of them were very sympathetic to the anti-Trinitarian views that were at the heart of the controversy.
Unitarians were never okay with the trinity. Hence the name. Most of them like Jesus, but as a prophet, a role model, a nonviolent revolutionary. Not God.
As support for Ulbrich’s statements regarding Adams, I reproduce here an exchange about the doctrine of the Trinity between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. First Jefferson wrote to Adams on August 22, 1813.
TO JOHN ADAMS
Monticello, August 22, 1813
DEAR SIR,—Since my letter of June the 27th, I am in your debt for many; all of which I have read with infinite delight. They open a wide field for reflection, and offer subjects enough to occupy the mind and the pen indefinitely. I must follow the good example you have set, and when I have not time to take up every subject, take up a single one. Your approbation of my outline to Dr. Priestley is a great gratification to me; and I very much suspect that if thinking men would have the courage to think for themselves, and to speak what they think, it would be found they do not differ in religious opinions as much as is supposed. I remember to have heard Dr. Priestley say, that if all England would candidly examine themselves, and confess, they would find that Unitarianism was really the religion of all; and I observe a bill is now depending in parliament for the relief of Anti-Trinitarians. It is too late in the day for men of sincerity to pretend they believe in the Platonic mysticisms that three are one, and one is three; and yet that the one is not three, and the three are not one…Sweep away their gossamer fabrics of factitious religion, and they would catch no more flies. We should all then, like the Quakers, live without an order of priests, moralize for ourselves, follow the oracle of conscience, and say nothing about what no man can understand, nor therefore believe; for I suppose belief to be the assent of the mind to an intelligible proposition.
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Adams wrote to Jefferson in reply and affirmed the same views regarding the Trinity.
JOHN ADAMS TO THOMAS JEFFERSON
QUINCY, September 14, 1813
DEAR SIR,—I owe you a thousand thanks for your favor of August 22d and its enclosures, and for Dr. Priestley’s doctrines of Heathen Philosophy compared with those of Revelation. Your letter to Dr. Rush and the syllabus, I return enclosed with this according to your injunctions, though with great reluctance. May I beg a copy of both?
They will do you no harm; me and others much good.
I hope you will pursue your plan, for I am confident you will produce a work much more valuable than Priestley’s, though that is curious, and considering the expiring powers with which it was written, admirable.
The bill in Parliament for the relief of Anti-Trinitarians, is a great event, and will form an epoch in ecclesiastical history. The motion was made by my friend Smith, of Clapham, a friend of the Belshams.
I should be very happy to hear that the bill is passed.
The human understanding is a revelation from its Maker which can never be disputed or doubted. There can be no scepticism, Pyrrhonism, or incredulity, or infidelity, here. No prophecies, no miracles are necessary to prove the celestial communication.
This revelation has made it certain that two and one make three, and that one is not three nor can three be one. We can never be so certain of any prophecy, or the fulfillment of any prophecy, or of any miracle, or the design of any miracle, as we are from the revelation of nature, i. e., Nature’s God, that two and two are equal to four. Miracles or prophecies might frighten us out of our wits; might scare us to death; might induce us to lie, to say that we believe that two and two make five. But we should not believe it. We should know the contrary.
Had you and I been forty days with Moses on Mount Sinai, and been admitted to behold the divine Shekinah, and there told that one was three and three one, we might not have had courage to deny it, but we could not have believed it.
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Here we see Adams ridiculing the idea of a Trinitarian deity, saying that even if Jefferson and he were the presence of God, they would be unable to believe in the Trinity because it is an unreasonable doctrine. Reason, granted by God, asserted Adams, would prevent such belief.
Historian John Fea, teaching at evangelical Christian Messiah College agrees that Adams rejected the divinity of Christ, hence also the Trinity. Although, as Fea notes, Adams attended different churches, his views settled on a Unitarian theology, very much at odds with orthodox Christianity.
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