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In Germany in 1799, just eleven years after the Federalist Papers appeared in America, the Protestant theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher wrote a marvelous book entitled On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers. He observed, in his high-spirited opening lines, that for a long time “faith has not been every man’s affair,” that only a “few have discerned religion itself, while millions, in various ways, have been satisfied to juggle with its trappings. Now, especially, the life of cultivated people is far from anything that might have even a resemblance to religion.” Teasing his sophisticated audience for their hostility to the subject—“I know how well you have succeeded in making your earthly life so rich and varied that you no longer stand in need of an eternity…You are agreed, I know, that nothing new, nothing convincing can any more be said on this matter”—he nonetheless plunged in.

Schleiermacher knew little of religion in the New World, but his comments hit very near the mark for America, then and now. And although our Founding Fathers didn’t know his sermons (which weren’t translated into English for almost a century), they might well have recognized some of the issues as Schleiermacher saw them. All these modern pioneers approached the church-state conundrum with a brilliant intellectual clarity and emotional, spiritual depth that was characteristic of their times. Those early years of our republic were years when religion’s place in society was explored profoundly on both sides of the Atlantic—in contrast to the loud but superficial rhetoric dominating the debate today—and we would do well to recall the terms they used and to consider the issues in the light of that epoch.

Let me first state my dubious credentials for writing on this subject. I think of myself as a Christian or, to use W. H. Auden’s impeccable response to the question as to whether he was one, “Well, I’m trying to be.” I grew up in the precincts of an interdenominational Protestant seminary, and though I was christened and confirmed as an Episcopalian, I attended many kinds of church service in my youth; I learned from my elders and betters that it was best to speak with courtesy to or about other Christians and non-Christians whatever their sect (I didn’t yet know how rare this was). I’m still a devout reader of the Gospels but now almost never go to church, having developed an allergy to the pious self-congratulatory tone that permeates so many of them. So I live as a skeptic and doubter, my view of churches afforded from both the familiar inside and the disaffected outside. Still, I hope I understand the wisdom of the words spoken by the man who brings his ailing son to be healed by Jesus and is instructed to believe. “Lord, I believe,” he answers, “help thou my unbelief.” Plenty of Americans find themselves in this in-between territory.

In college, as a student of the French and Scottish Enlightenments, I was enraptured by the ideas advanced by Descartes, Hume, Locke, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot—ideas which I was certain had changed the world for the better. I became a lifelong, fervent enthusiast for the Enlightenment program of ridding human society of superstition and fear, evils that from the points of view of these writers had been most powerfully propagated over the centuries by the church, with the strength of sword and gallows behind it, with royal armies, prisons, and laws supporting the ecclesia. These men wanted, instead, to get people to trust in their own judgment and the workings of their own minds.

Now, is there an inevitable contradiction between those great Enlightenment aims to advance knowledge and understanding and the enlightening goals of true religion? I don’t think so, any more than Schleiermacher did, or John Adams, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson. Eighteenth-century deists as our Founding Fathers were, they claimed to believe in an almighty being that had created the natural world, while they rejected the notions of “revealed religion.” Their deism gave them an honorable position from which to deal with their conventionally devout fellow citizens, the depth of whose spiritual sentiments they respected.

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