(RNS) — At the end of his latest lament for the MAGA makeover of American evangelicalism, New York Times columnist David French turns to President John Adams’ 1798 letter to the Massachusetts militia, which he calls “a critical founding document.”
That’s because it contains some lines that, French notes, evangelicals (including him) love to quote.
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People,” wrote Adams. “It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Was he right?
If the constitutional conventioneers in 1787 thought so, they gave precious little indication of it. In Article 6, they voted overwhelmingly and with little debate to ban religious tests for office. Asked why the customary invocation to God was not included in the Preamble, Alexander Hamilton reportedly quipped, “We forgot it.” The First Amendment subsequently barred Congress from doing anything to establish religion.
To be sure, a few states did retain for a while their own religious establishments, Massachusetts longer than any. Its 1780 constitution, which Adams himself drafted, notably authorized such an establishment on classic civil religious grounds: that “the good order and preservation of civil government, essentially depend upon piety, religion and morality.”
But Adams sounds a note of anxiety in his 1798 letter that he hadn’t previously. “We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion,” he wrote. “Avarice, Ambition Revenge or Galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net.”
This echoed some famous lines from two years before. “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports,” George Washington wrote (with some ghostwriting help from Alexander Hamilton) in his Farewell Address. “In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens.”
What explains this new level of concern?
By the mid-1790s, the anti-religious fervor of the French Revolution, which resulted in the guillotining of priests and nuns during the Reign of Terror, had undermined the framers’ cavalier attitude toward religion in public life. Federalists like Adams were panicked at the thought that pro-French Thomas Jefferson, whom they accused of atheism, would be elected president.
Under the circumstances, it is not irrelevant that Adams wrote his letter to the Massachusetts militia in the midst of the bitter controversy over the Alien and Sedition Acts, which enabled him to imprison and deport noncitizens and to criminalize criticism of his government in the press. Attacked as violations of the First Amendment in resolutions by the anti-Federalist legislatures of Kentucky and Virginia, the Acts amounted to an extraconstitutional means of controlling the kinds of unbridled human passions that, in Adams’ view, the Constitution alone could not control.
Adams’ 1798 letter matters, in the view of David French, because it recognizes the importance of “public virtue” to a republic. “Absent public virtue, a republic can fall,” he writes. “And a Trump win in 2024 would absolutely convince countless Americans that virtue is for suckers, and vice is the key to victory.”
In fact, MAGA-world has its own concern about the country’s morality. It is panicked about purported threats from Marxists and atheists, from liberals dedicated to abortion and transgender rights, from a deep state determined to destroy religious liberty and vaccinate the populace, from drag queens and child abusers, from CRT and DEI.
When a moral panic prevails in national politics, “any means necessary” takes over, whether by way of the Alien and Sedition Acts or Donald Trump’s disavowal of dictatorship “other than day one” and his call for the “termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”
