Thursday, February 19th, UVA’s Karsh Institute of Democracy held the latest installment in its “Touchstones of Democracy” series. The series is an array of events conducted in the lead-up to the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, dedicated to showcasing books that expand the UVA community’s understanding of the American Revolution and its relevance today.
This panel discussed religion, specifically the role of religion and the government’s relationship with religion in both the American founding and present-day America. The conversation centered around two recently released books by noted scholars in the fields of religion and American history: Jerome Copulsky’s “American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order,” which examines the history of criticisms of American liberal constitutionalism from a religious perspective, and Adam Jortner’s “A Promised Land: Jewish Patriots, the American Revolution, and the Birth of Religious Freedom,” which examines the role of Jewish Americans in the American revolution and their broader role in the establishment of religious freedom in the United States. Copulsky is a research fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, while Jortner is a history professor at Auburn University.
The event began with opening remarks by the Karsh Institute’s Executive Director, Melody Barnes reflecting on the significance of religion and religious freedom to debates over the nature of American governance. Barnes’s remarks were followed by an introduction from the moderator of the panel, Nichole Flores, a professor of religious studies at the University.
Flores began the conversation by asking each panelist what the “origin stories” of their respective books were. Jortner had two explanations, one simple and one complex: the simple explanation was that he was waiting for his second child to be born and needed something to distract him from the stress, and the more complicated one was that he had been doing research beforehand that helped illustrate to him the strong presence of Jewish Americans among the Patriots of the Revolutionary War, which went against other notions of the Patriots as a religiously and culturally homogenous group. Copulsky explained that he had noticed a pattern among many religious intellectuals in which they seemed to question the idea of America as a “Christian nation” from the start, and wanted to do research into the origins of similar movements.
The panelists then moved on to the differing views different religious groups had on the American Revolution as it happened. Jortner explained that Jewish Americans had many incentives to support the Patriots, as while under the established-church regime of George III, they had few opportunities to obtain high office and success without renouncing their religion. Copulsky explained that members of the Church of England, by contrast, especially clergymen, had a vested interest in supporting the Loyalists, especially given the anti-establishment rhetoric of the Patriots.
The next question dealt with debates over church and state in the Founding Era. Copulsky noted that after the Constitution was drafted and ratified without any explicit references to God or a state religion, some devoutly religious Americans, such as a group of Presbyterians known as Covenanters, attempted to reject interaction with the government entirely. He drew further comparisons to modern-day anti-government Christian movements and movements to make America affirm itself as a Christian nation. Jortner called attention to the idea of a “Great Chain of Being” in which the king was a divinely-ordained representative of God above all other subjects, and emphasized the degree to which the American Revolution challenged this.
Flores then asked the panelists about the role of race in discussions surrounding religious liberty. Jortner raised the example of Mordecai Sheftall, a Patriot soldier who helped defend the city of Savannah during the war and who, after the British had retaken Savannah, received a great deal of disapproval from the returning British governor. He explained that to many Europeans at the time, Christian and Jewish Europeans were seen as coming from different races; novel ways of thinking in the American colonies helped to change some of these views.
For her final question, Flores asked the panelists what people hoping to navigate the current religious terrain of the United States might hope to get from the books being discussed. Copulsky gave an example from the 1950s, in which a group of Covenanters attempted to pass an amendment to the Constitution declaring the United States a Christian nation; those who came to a hearing to oppose them were Jewish-American representatives who appealed to the tradition established during the Founding Era of separation of church and state. In his view, these appeals to the Founding Era still have relevance today.
The panel then moved to audience Q&A, which included questions about Jefferson’s views on separation of church and state, the influence of religion on Supreme Court decisions such as Brown v. Board, and the historical origins of the term “Judeo-Christian.”
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