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This website is legit because it is a .org, it looks professional, the author is stated, there are no typos/errors, there are citations, there is a date of publicaions, and the facts are stated clearly"The American colonies began developing a democratic tradition during their earliest stages of development."

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Sea travel expanded the horizons of many European nations and created prosperity and the conditions for the Enlightenment. In turn, the Enlightenment ideals of liberty, equality, and justice helped to create the conditions for the American Revolution and the subsequent Constitution.

Democracy was not created in a heartbeat. In a world where people were ruled by monarchs from above, the idea of self-government is entirely alien. Democracy takes practice and wisdom from experience.

The American colonies began developing a democratic tradition during their earliest stages of development. Over 150 years later, the colonists believed their experience was great enough to refuse to recognize the British king. The first decade was rocky. The American Revolution and the domestic instability that followed prompted a call for a new type of government with a constitution to guarantee liberty. The constitution drafted in the early days of the independent American republic has endured longer than any in human history.

Where did this democratic tradition truly begin? The ideas and practices that led to the development of the American democratic republic owe a debt to the ancient civilizations of Greece and Rome, the Protestant Reformation, and Gutenberg's printing press. But the Enlightenment of 17th-century Europe had the most immediate impact on the framers of the United States Constitution.

The Philosophes

Europeans of the 17th century no longer lived in the "darkness" of the Middle Ages. Ocean voyages had put them in touch with many world civilizations, and trade had created a prosperous middle class. The Protestant Reformation encouraged free thinkers to question the practices of the Catholic Church, and the printing press spread the new ideas relatively quickly and easily. The time was ripe for the philosophes , scholars who promoted democracy and justice through discussions of individual liberty and equality.

The ideas of 18th-century philosophes inspired the Founding Fathers to revolt against what they perceived as unfair British taxation. Washington Crossing the Delaware is one of the most famous depictions of the American Revolution.

One of the first philosophes was Thomas Hobbes, an Englishman who concluded in his famous book, Leviathan, that people are incapable of ruling themselves, primarily because humans are naturally self-centered and quarrelsome and need the iron fist of a strong leader. Later philosophes, like Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Rousseau were more optimistic about democracy. Their ideas encouraged the questioning of absolute monarchs, like the Bourbon family that ruled France. Montesquieu suggested a separation of powers into branches of government not unlike the system Americans would later adopt. They found eager students who later became the founders of the American government.

John Locke

The single most important influence that shaped the founding of the United States comes from John Locke, a 17th century Englishman who redefined the nature of government. Although he agreed with Hobbes regarding the self-interested nature of humans, he was much more optimistic about their ability to use reason to avoid tyranny. In his Second Treatise of Government, Locke identified the basis of a legitimate government. According to Locke, a ruler gains authority through the consent of the governed. The duty of that government is to protect the natural rights of the people, which Locke believed to include life, liberty, and property. If the government should fail to protect these rights, its citizens would have the right to overthrow that government. This idea deeply influenced Thomas Jefferson as he drafted the Declaration of Independence.

Important English Documents

Ironically, the English political system provided the grist for the revolt of its own American colonies. For many centuries English monarchs had allowed restrictions to be placed on their ultimate power. The Magna Carta, written in 1215, established the kernel of limited government, or the belief that the monarch's rule was not absolute. Although the document only forced King John to consult nobles before he made arbitrary decisions like passing taxes, the Magna Carta provided the basis for the later development of Parliament. Over the years, representative government led by a Prime Minister came to control and eventually replace the king as the real source of power in Britain.

The ideas of the French Enlightenment philosophes strongly influenced the American revolutionaries. French intellectuals met in salons like this one to exchange ideas and define their ideals such as liberty, equality, and justice.

The Petition of Right (1628) extended the rights of "commoners" to have a voice in the government. The English Bill of Rights (1688) guaranteed free elections and rights for citizens accused of crime. Although King George III still had some real power in 1776, Britain was already well along on the path of democracy by that time.

The foundations of American government lie squarely in the 17th and 18th century European Enlightenment. The American founders were well versed in the writings of the philosophes, whose ideas influenced the shaping of the new country. Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, James Madison, and others took the brave steps of creating a government based on the Enlightenment values of liberty, equality, and a new form of justice. More than 200 years later, that government is still intact.

Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes said that humans are savages who need a strong leader to tell them what to do. Hard to believe he was just a stuffed orange cat.

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Sea travel expanded the horizons of many European nations and created prosperity and the conditions for the Enlightenment. In turn, the Enlightenment ideals of liberty, equality, and justice helped to create the conditions for the American Revolution and the subsequent Constitution. Democracy was not created in a heartbeat.

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This website is legit because it is an educational website, it looks professional, the author is stated, there are not typos/errors, there are citations, there is a date of publications, and lastly the information is in depth. "Christianity grew out of the Jewish religion that emerged in the Near East during ancient times."

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We need to understand some basics about Christian history to understand colonial, Revolutionary, and 19th century America. We won't delve far into theology or matters of faith, but some basic church history will help explain the Protestant Reformation: a major schism within Christianity that changed history in ways so embedded in the Western world that they're easy to overlook or take for granted. For one, in a classic case where history "makes for strange bedfellows," the Reformation's challenge to Catholic doctrine reinforced the Scientific Revolution. Moreover, it provided ideological justification for modern banking and capitalism and Western notions of representative government and equality. In short, it's impossible to unravel America's Revolution, culture, or economy without taking Protestant doctrine into account. If these fundamentals aren't enough to warrant investigation, there is religion itself. The Reformation gave rise to all forms of Protestant Christianity outside the established Church - or what we now call the Roman Catholic Church - including Lutheran, Baptist, Presbyterian, Methodist, United Church of Christ, Reformed, all forms of evangelical fundamentalism, and Mormonism. Here we'll trace some early Christian history forward through the Reformation and "connect the dots" through England to early American history.

Early Christianity
Christianity grew out of the Jewish religion that emerged in the Near East during ancient times. From that Judaic trunk sprouted Christianity in the 1st century CE and Islam in the 7th CE. Together, these "desert faiths" are sometimes called the Abrahamic Religions since they all trace to the Biblical patriarch Abraham (Muslims also believe that Adam, Noah, David, Solomon, Moses, and Jesus were prophets). There have been major splits within both the Islamic and Christian branches. Monophysite Christianity, prominent in Africa and the Middle East (e.g. the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria), branched off in the 5th century, stressing that Jesus was purely divine rather than a combination of human and divine. A second major fork-in-the-road for Christianity was between the Eastern Orthodox and Western Roman Catholic Church in the 11th century, resulting in the former being based in Constantinople with no Pope or celibacy requirements for priests and the latter based at the Vatican (Holy See) in Rome, Italy. That Great Schism also resulted from disagreements over the Holy Trinity, the type of bread appropriate for communion, and the Roman Bishop claiming superiority over bishops of Constantinople, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria. Then there was a major split within the Western church in the early 16th century when Protestant denominations broke away from Catholicism during the Reformation.

It's helpful to know something about early Christianity to see why later Protestant reformers like Martin Luther came to distrust the institutional (Catholic) church's authority. Early Christians started out as a small sect on the outskirts of the Roman Empire along the eastern Mediterranean, in Judea. As historians learned in the 19th and 20th centuries, they varied widely in their interpretations before there was an agreed-upon Biblical canon. In the 1st century CE, apostles led by Paul spread their gospel to (non-Jewish) Gentiles, especially in Asia Minor (now Turkey) and Greece. Slowly, these followers of Christ came to be called Christians. Paul took advantage of the Romans' vast road system (e.g. Via Egnatia), designed to move soldiers and trade, to spread the faith. Also, Romans relocated slaves captured in the unsuccessful Jewish Revolt (66-73 CE) throughout the empire, inadvertently spreading Christianity along with them. The sheer size of the empire helped disseminate the religion as early "proto-orthodox" theologians from Lyon (France), Carthage (Tunisia), and Smyrna (Turkey) worked out its accepted interpretations and set up hierarchies of bishops, presbyters, and deacons.

Romans persecuted these early Christians for not worshipping state-sanctioned gods, most dramatically throwing some to the lions along with other criminals for spectators' amusement. According to the historian Tacitus, after the Great Fire of Rome in 64 CE, Emperor Nero scapegoated Christians and they executed Paul, apostle Peter, and others. They steamed to death or beheaded some martyrs and, at first, Christians built their churches to look like houses to stay under cover. Others saw Christians as cannibals for ceremonially "eating Christ" in their communions, incestuous for calling each other "brother" and "sister," or just strange for providing healthcare to the poor. Persecution helped bind Christians together, just as it had for Jews and would later for Mormons in 19th-century America.

Gradually Christians found common ground with Romans. In keeping with Roman society, many Gentile Christians remained anti-Semitic, overlooking that Jesus himself and his disciples were Jewish, at least according to the Synoptic Gospels, the first three accounts of Jesus in the New Testament. The fourth gospel author, John, and early church fathers like Marcion of Sinope, Barnabas, and St. John Chrysostom distanced the religion from Judaism, focusing instead on most Jews not accepting Christ as their Messiah and Jewish priests acquiescing in Christ's arrest and crucifixion. Many Jews interpreted prophecy as foretelling a warrior king messiah that would vanquish foreign rulers from Judea rather than a martyr who was killed by Romans. If John (the gospel writer) was right that Christ was divine, then obstinate Jews, by misinterpreting their own sacred writings, had even "killed God." In the words of Biblical historian Bart Ehrman, "One of the real ironies of the early Christian tradition, [is] that the original form of the religion [was] cast out and denounced...The profoundly Jewish religion of Jesus and his followers became the viciously anti-Jewish religion of later times, leading to the horrific persecutions of the Middle Ages and the pogroms and attempted genocides that have plagued the world down to recent times." One of the exceptional things about colonial America, as we'll see toward the end of this chapter, is that it took the first baby steps in the Western world toward overcoming the centuries of ugliness engendered by these theological disputes.

Early Christians had other things in common with their fellow Romans. Just as some Romans ate the flesh of their dead in the catacombs, Christians symbolically ate the flesh of Christ through the Eucharist, the taking of communion. These Romans saw the "eating of Christ" as common ground rather than setting Christians apart. As they gradually came out of hiding, early Christian churches adopted the rectangular-shaped, basilica style of Roman churches. Just as Romans celebrated December 25th as the birth of their Sun God, Sol Invictus (later Mithras), Christians adopted that date as Christ's birthday, though Pope Benedict XVI argued that was a coincidence. While historians reject the coincidental theory, some see the Christmas date as a challenge to Roman religion while others see the overlap as an effective way for Christians to recruit pagans to their faith. Some art historians interpret the mosaic below from the pre-4th-century necropolis beneath St. Peter's in the Vatican as a hybrid of Christ and either Sol or Apollo Helios, the personification of the Sun in Greek mythology. Like later Christians, Romans also used trees to celebrate their weeklong December Saturnalia holiday. Likewise, Easter celebrations morphed out of earlier traditions, though, in that case, unlike Christ's birth, the New Testament clarified the chronology of the Resurrection. Other aspects of Christ's story paralleled aspects of Greek and Egyptian mythologies.

The takeaway is that future Protestants saw this blending with other religions as compromising even if, at the time, it was probably necessary for Christianity's survival as it assimilated into mainstream Roman life. Early Christianity may not have survived, in other words, if it hadn't adapted by soaking up some aspects of existing mythologies, even as it maintained its essential messages. Eventually, Christianity grew popular enough that Emperor Constantine legalized the prevailing Roman version of it after his conversion in 312 CE. Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, Egypt, codified the 27 books in today's New Testament in 367 CE and Emperor Theodosius I declared Nicene Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire in 380 CE.

Protestant Reformation
As the Roman Empire fell into political and military decline over the next few centuries, its main institutional remnant was the Christian church. Medieval Christianity split into the two aforementioned seats of power: Rome (west) and Constantinople (east). Fast-forwarding five-hundred years and through numerous smaller schisms, the Western church grew politically powerful and prone to the same imperfections as a secular government. The Pope was sometimes called the "pope-king" and much of what's now Italy was divided into the Papal States.

Some theologians challenged the canon, or which gospels had been included or left out of the New Testament (that varied regionally), but even more protested against the Church and its controversial policies. Included among their complaints were ongoing instances of child abuse and extramarital affairs caused (presumably) by its celibacy requirement, church-sponsored brothels, corruption of the papal throne by wealthy and influential non-theologians, conducting of masses in Latin, and selling of indulgences to grieving relatives for the Church to liberate lost souls from Purgatory, a purported stage of afterlife between Heaven and Hell. While Catholic rituals provided great comfort to many, Latin was a "dead language" unspoken in most parts of Europe, making it impossible for most parishioners to understand what was said during mass. The Church was also harsh in stamping out Europe's traditional folk religions that it defined as , or different interpretations of Christianity that it defined as . Many peasants resented the relative comfort of monasteries, where monks stayed warm and had plenty to eat and drink, despite the fact that they labored hard at farming, construction, and transcribing. Protests by early heretics like John Wycliffe (1330-1384) of England and Jan Hus (1369-1415) of Bohemia met with harsh repression. Wycliffe (right) led a movement to translate the Bible from Latin into English in the late 14th century.

In 1517, one protester - root of the term Protestant - expanded on Wycliffe and Hus' earlier complaints but with more lasting success. Augustinian monk Martin Luther escaped his predecessors' fate despite boldly nailing his Ninety-Five Theses (complaints) onto the door of his home cathedral in Wittenberg, in what's now Germany. Wycliffe's followers, the Lollards, had likewise nailed their complaints to the door of Westminster Hall in 1395. Per protocol, Luther's initial post was a call for debate at the local university. Luther shared the usual concerns; a recent sale of indulgences motivated his complaints and most of his early controversy surrounded indulgences, the proceeds of which lined monk's pockets with the rest toward construction of St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican. The monk selling the round of indulgences that set off Luther had a sales pitch translating to: "As soon as the coin in the coffee [cup] rings, so the soul from purgatory springs."

As the firestorm kicked in and the Church demanded that Luther recant his views or be excommunicated, he doubled down and expanded his critique beyond indulgences to challenge Church authority. It's often said of Luther that he wasn't envisioning a new church, only debate and reform within his own Catholic Church. Yet eventually Luther wanted to wash away the Catholic bureaucracy altogether - including the Pope, whom he denied was divinely ordained, and the whole ecclesiastical hierarchy of cardinals, bishops, etc. beneath him. His idea was a religious version of what economists later called disintermediation, or "cutting out the middleman." For Luther, an ordained priest and theology professor, the institutionalized Church was an unnecessary intermediary between people and their faith. Based on his reading of St. Paul's words in Romans 3:28, faith alone justified salvation, even without a church. This salvation-by-faith doctrine was known in Latin as .

Luther wanted the early Roman corruptions like Christmas celebrations washed clean, though a story developed later (perhaps as a way to reconcile traditions) that Luther put the first candles on winter evergreens to commemorate Christ's birth. A century later, New England Puritans forbade Yuletide, but German Protestants viewed the Christmas Tree as a less anthropomorphic representation of Christ or the Three Wise Men and less profane than the mistletoes pagans used in mid-winter fertility rituals. Luther's famous protest symbolically came on All Saint's Day, the sort of neo-pagan holiday he abhorred.

The holidays were just a start, though, especially once Luther's ideas spread to others, like his friend Andreas Karlstadt. If the Ten Commandments forbade graven images of God, then Karlstadt argued that statues, paintings, and stained glass should be removed from churches as well. While reformers destroyed and vandalized much traditional art, the Reformation nonetheless freed art from its strictly religious domain, giving rise to still lifes, landscapes, and depictions of everyday life (novels about everyday life also rose in popularity). Protestant services were conducted in local languages, or vernaculars, rather than Latin, so that people could understand what was being said. In keeping with that spirit of participation, Protestant congregations participated in music by singing their own hymns. Luther himself wrote hymns, most famously "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God," as did Lutheran J.S. Bach a century later. Most importantly, Protestants believed that the Bible should be in the hands of the congregation, translated into their respective vernaculars. Protestants vested authority in Scripture, not the Church. The Scriptural emphasis was incidentally revolutionary in another way because it required literacy, and future Protestants led the movement for compulsory public education. The back-to-basics focus on participation, simplicity, equality, and Scripture created what early Protestants called the Priesthood of All Believers. Though they left room for ministers to administer baptisms and communion, everyone in the congregation was a "priest" in his or her own right.

You'll note this was called the Reformation, not the Formation. Protestants hoped to return the Church to an earlier, purer state - the way they imagined it to have been before its assimilation into the Roman Empire. As mentioned, Luther initially wasn't founding a new church; he was just trying to reform and spark debate within the Catholic Church. The 95 Theses he nailed to the door at Wittenberg were in Latin, the language of the Church. But in subsequent interrogation, Luther denied the authority of the Church, perhaps even surprising himself when the words came out of his mouth. When Pope Leo X (born Giovanni Lorenzo de' Medici) issued a bull correcting Luther's views, Luther excommunicated himself before the Church could excommunicate him. By then he was convinced that the Antichrist was acting through the papal throne. He burned the bull and renounced his allegiance to the Church at the Diet of Worms in 1521.

Holy Roman Emperor Charles V of Spain condemned Luther and convicted him of treason but allowed him to escape. The Pope and Charles V, who organized and attended the trial at Worms, might have later dealt with Luther the way the Church had earlier heretics - over the open flame or on the rack - were it not for the threat of Muslim invasion in central Europe. As we saw in Chapter 2, Islam made inroads into Byzantium, southeastern Europe, and Iberia, including the takeover of Constantinople, seat of the Eastern Roman Empire, renaming it Istanbul in 1453. Other Europeans wanted to avoid this fate and even launched several pre-emptive Crusades in the Middle Ages to destroy Islam in the contested Holy Land. Now, with Ottoman (Muslim, Turkish) armies threatening central Europe, German princes took a sudden liking to Luther's criticism of Catholic authority. Some may have had genuine theological motives, but power can be a zero sum game and leaders like Frederick III of Saxony (aka Frederick the Wise) stood to gain money and property at the Church's expense by extracting a price for their military protection. The Sicilian Mafia didn't invent protection rackets. As of 1517, the Catholic Church owned ~ 50% of all land in Europe. In short, if the Vatican wanted the princes' cooperation in fending off the Ottomans and keeping that land, they were compelled to go easier on Luther than they otherwise would have; however, the princes also had their sights set on more land. Frederick was one of the electors within the loose conglomeration of fiefdoms in present-day Germany then known as the Holy Roman Empire. Leo X didn't want to alienate the electors within the Empire any more than he had to.

Frederick's men kidnapped Luther and provided him shelter at the Wartburg castle in what's now eastern Germany. Luther grew a beard and went by the alias "George." With his only allegiance to Scripture, Luther was now what Christian theologians starting calling a Lutheran (later a Protestant denomination) instead of what we'd now call a Catholic. Luther condemned priestly celibacy and married a nun. Six children later and enjoying his newfound domesticity (and ignoring the key historical role of monks in keeping Scripture intact for centuries), Luther wrote that "household chores are more to be valued than all the works of monks and nuns." The Reformation shaped modern Christianity's emphasis on the nuclear family.

Over the next decade, regional princes formed an alliance around Luther, especially after the Augsburg Confession of 1530 that Lutherans drafted just as Charles V was looking to unite Germans against Islam and fend off an invasion from the west by France. Charles V condemned the Augsburg Confession but had too many problems on his hands for military action against fellow Christians given the Muslim threat and a brewing divorce between the English King Henry VIII and his aunt, Catherine of Aragon (more below).

Meanwhile, the German princes and nobles also had to fend off revolutions from below that Luther's combustible ideas inadvertently sparked. Though Luther discouraged challenging political authority, he'd brought attention to Acts 5:29, which argued to obey God, not men. Religious and political authority were so intertwined in late medieval Europe that it was impossible to challenge one without the other. In 1524-25, German peasant Thomas Münzter led a failed Peasant's War that ended in his decapitation and the death of 50-60k peasants but foreshadowed future class struggle. The image below depicts the fate of Lutheran rebel Little Jack Rohrbach.

The religious side of the Reformation fared better because Luther had a weapon earlier heretics like John Wycliffe and Jan Hus hadn't possessed: the printing press. His revolution coincided with the technological revolution in print and paper we discussed in Chapter 2. Luther's original Ninety-Five Theses were widely copied and translated into German (initially, without his knowledge) and he personally transcribed the New Testament from Latin into German in 1522 and shuttled it to the presses; he finished the Old Testament in 1534. During the first decade, the Theses, sermons, illustrated catechisms in poster form, and pamphlets were even more influential than the Bible itself, with roughly a third of the six million sold in Germany penned by Luther, and he wrote three other books in 1520, alone. Many Germans had portraits of Luther hanging in the homes next to the catechism sheets. Luther put particular emphasis on sermons, which became a hallmark of Protestant Christianity. His writing was earthy and humorous, filled with colorful insults toward his "evil scum" detractors. There were also songs, paintings, and woodcuts, including crude images of she-devils, defecating popes and monks and the like - images with currency among regular people. Conversely, when Catholics countered the Protestant message it was usually in Latin, legible only to their own theologians and academics.

Continent-wide, other transcribers soon copied sermons and Bibles into French, Dutch, Scandinavian languages, etc., setting off a theological firestorm and turning the Bible into an early and perennial bestseller. While Wycliffe didn't live to see it, his dream of seeing a widespread English Bible came to fruition. By then it wouldn't have mattered much if the Church had dealt with Luther the way the nobility dealt with Little Jack Rohrbach; the Bible had already "gone viral."

Religious Conflict
The Catholic Church neither took this challenge lightly nor agreed to shore up its act and make fundamental changes. They retrenched, clarified their positions, and condemned Protestant heresy in a series of Councils in Trento, Italy. Thus began the Counter-Reformation and a 150-year period of violent factionalism collectively called the Wars of Religion (1524-1628). Charles V led his army into Protestant areas, including Wittenberg where he destroyed Luther's farm. This was not an era of live and let live in the spirit of modern religious freedom or tolerance. Tolerance, in general, was thought of as a weakness until modern times. Most agreed that life's hardships - epidemics, famines, earthquakes, fires, etc. - resulted from God's anger at the way the community as a whole worshiped or didn't. Consequently, Protestants and Catholics felt compelled to wipe each other out in order to save Europe. Without understanding this background, it's impossible to fully appreciate the religious freedom pioneered by future Americans like Roger Williams, William Penn, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington or, for that matter, why so many Americans resisted their efforts.

The Roman Inquisition (Catholic tribunal) also stepped up its attack on Jews and, following Rome's lead, most European cities segregated Jewish ghettos. Within Italy, the Inquisition actually went pretty light on Lutherans and other heretics as long as they recanted their views and agreed to a proper education. For his part, Martin Luther missed an opportunity to expunge anti-Semitism from the Protestant fork of Christianity. At first, he advised kindness and toleration in That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew (1523). But Luther grew frustrated at his inability to convert. In On the Jews and Their Lies (1543) he wrote that their synagogues and prayer books should be destroyed, their homes smashed, their property and money confiscated, and that the "envenomed worms" should be forced into labor camps or expelled "for all time." History's most important Protestant theologian even wrote of Jews, "We are at fault in not slaying them." We should be careful not to draw too deterministic a line from "Luther to Hitler" (see Rear Defogger 26-8 above) - Luther didn't exist to lay a foundation for Nazism. However, it's true that they exploited his writings. Four centuries after Luther's book, Nazis opportunistically displayed and read from it at their Nuremberg Rallies. (Around that same time, one American visiting Germany saw inspiration in Luther instead of hate. Michael King changed his name to Martin Luther King, Sr. and his son's name to Martin Luther King, Jr.)

Around 10-20% of the European population was killed in the Religious Wars, mainly in the course of nine conflicts that culminated in the Thirty Years' War. The many other reasons humans fight, including power, resources-land, money, and generic cruelty, sadism, revenge, and vindictiveness were, in turn, swept up in the hysteria and framed or rationalized under the religious rubric. In other words, Europe obviously wouldn't have experienced 150 years of uninterrupted peace and tranquility if the Reformation hadn't happened. Yet this was the prevailing framework of conflict, just as capitalism and communism were during the Cold War of the 20th century. By comparison to the Religious Wars' 10-20% of Europeans, World War II killed roughly 3% of the world's population in the 1930s and 40's, though its 60-70 million dead constituted a higher total and it only lasted eight years.

The violence was spotty and sporadic. Italy, whose kingdoms surrounded the nearby Vatican, remained Catholic. Christians closed ranks around Catholicism in Spain, as well, because their energies had been exhausted fighting Muslims and co-existing with Jews in previous centuries. The Spanish Inquisition eventually cracked down on Protestants but only after their emperor Charles V initially legalized Lutheranism, seeing it understandably enough as an inter-Catholic dispute since Luther was Catholic. Germany and northern Europe were more evenly split with Scandinavia leaning toward Protestantism. In the Thirty Year's War Sack of Magdeburg (Germany), a Catholic League army killed ~ 20k Protestants in a single day. France was mostly Catholic but had enough Protestants to warrant an entire subset of massacres and edicts called the French Wars of Religion (1562-1598) severe enough to disrupt France's colonial American agenda (Chapter 3). In his essay "Of Cannibals," Michel de Montaigne wrote of rival Christians who "hack at another man's limbs and lop them off, and would cudgel their brains to invent unusual tortures and new forms of murder." In one notorious event foreshadowing the Rwandan genocide of 1994, French Catholics simultaneously murdered (Protestants) en masse on St. Bartholomew's Day, 1572. France nonetheless ended up with a Protestant King, Henry IV, who survived twelve assassination attempts before finally being killed by a Catholic fanatic.

Calvinists, Jesuits & Puritans
Luther's most devout French follower, John Calvin, agreed with Luther's doctrine of sola fide, or salvation by faith alone not "works" (good deeds). Calvin established a community of Protestants across the French border in Geneva, Switzerland who ruled themselves politically in their own republic and believed in predestination: that an elect of God was chosen before birth to be saved. Some of his Huguenots fled to America to escape Catholic persecution, though in smaller numbers than their English counterparts would a couple of generations later. However, the Religious Wars accelerated all European missionary work because both Protestants and Catholics thought it important to beat the other to the punch in converting heathens in Africa, Asia, and America. For many American Indians of the Midwest, Great Lakes, and Canada, the first Europeans they encountered were Jesuit Black Robes - missionary followers of Ignatius Loyola, who founded the Society of Jesus in Spain in 1534 as an arm of the Counter-Reformation. Missionaries from other Catholic orders such as Dominicans and Franciscans went to Northern New Spain, or what's now the American Southwest (Chapter 3).

In England, a Protestant group called Puritans who hoped to purify the Church spread Calvinist doctrine. Some of these Puritans migrated to America, where they set up replicas of Geneva such as Boston, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Calvin also influenced Protestants to loosen up restrictions on credit and lending at interest, helping to establish the capitalist system that fueled exploratory joint stock companies like the Massachusetts Bay Company and Virginia Company of London (Chapter 2). While Calvinists believed in predestination, the elect had to constantly prove themselves worthy of God's grace and that translated into hard work, that translated into money. Wealth, then, was evidence of God's grace (today's version of the idea is Prosperity Theology). In the interest of breaking down the old Catholic dichotomy of profane and sacred - the outer world versus the church or monastery - Calvin and Luther preached that professions outside the Church could be just as Godly as those within. Keeping track of one's hard work on the job or around the house involved cataloging it, and the Reformation thus gave rise to the diary and autobiography.

English Reformation
The Reformation and Wars of Religion in England had implications for America. There, the soap operas of the Tudor Dynasty, rather than actual theology, first triggered the unraveling of Catholic authority. Then genuine theological disputes kicked in among subsequent generations of rulers and their subjects, leading to over a century of turmoil. You don't need to learn the gory details, but we're going to run through some of them anyway to give you an idea of what transpired. That will help you understand why colonial Americans later avoided hereditary rule and separated church and state.

The Tudor dynasty's first monarch, King Henry VII, wanted to consolidate power with Spain through inter-marriage because of the power and wealth that the Castilians acquired colonizing America (Chapter 3). He arranged for his son Arthur to marry Ferdinand and Isabella's daughter, Catherine of Aragon. However, Arthur died of tuberculosis four months after the wedding and, through a special dispensation from the Pope, Catherine then married Arthur's brother, Henry VIII. The two had a long marriage and one daughter, Mary, but weren't able to produce a male heir (they lost one male infant, Henry). Despondent, Henry fell in love with a conniving courtier named Anne Boleyn after having an affair with her sister, Mary (he'd had at least one earlier affair and a male son, Henry Fitzroy, before he met the Boleyn sisters). Desiring to marry Anne Boleyn and divorce Catherine, Henry's only recourse given the laws of the time was to seek permission for an annulment from the Pope. But Pope Clement VII denied the request because marriage was for life and he didn't want to alienate the emerging Spanish monarchy at a time when the Church was desperately hanging onto whatever power it had left over the rulers of Europe. Pope Clement christened Spanish king Charles V Holy Roman Emperor in 1530 after Charles invaded Italy, and Charles was Catherine of Aragon's nephew. Outraged, Henry thought the Pope owed him a favor for having burned several English Lutherans at the stake in the 1520s. After accusing Catherine of having consummated her brief marriage with his brother Arthur - which would have invalidated his own - Henry took matters into his own hands and severed England's ties with the Catholic Church.

With the blessing of Canterbury Archbishop Thomas Cranmer (himself secretly married) and lawyer Thomas Cromwell, King Henry declared himself Pope of a new church in 1534 known as the Church of England or Anglican Church. By virtue of his Act of Supremacy, Henry's first act was to grant himself a divorce. The Reformation had helped turn marriage into more of a civic than religious practice and the Vatican's unwillingness to sanction Henry's divorce led to the English Reformation. Henry had his Lord Chancellor Sir Thomas More beheaded for opposing the break with Rome and his troops plundered the country's Catholic monasteries, selling off the proceeds to the nobility that stood to gain from the Reformation in the same way German princes had. Henry's crown collected the same taxes collected by the Catholic Church prior to 1534, known as first fruits and tenths.

Henry's subsequent marital life is the stuff of legend. The increasingly gluttonous sociopath went through six wives total, beheading two of them, all the while failing to produce a healthy male heir to assume power upon his death (likely the fault of his own undiagnosed medical complications). The final count read: "divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived." His one son, Edward VI (with his third wife Jane Seymour), ruled from age nine until his death at 15, at which point Henry and Catherine's daughter Mary ascended to the throne even though the dying young Protestant Edward had directed otherwise.

By then, the problems with England's Anglican Church were apparent. Nearly everyone on either side of the Catholic-Protestant divide was unhappy with the ambiguity of the new church, and both groups ended up feeling the brunt of persecution at one point or another as Henry's children vacillated back and forth along the theological spectrum. The respective zealotries of Protestant Edward VI and Catholic Mary could squelch debate by force in the short run, but only fueled free thinking about religion in the long run. Catholics resented the break with Rome, while Protestants viewed the "pseudo-Catholic" Anglican Church as reformed in name only. The Anglican Church retained Catholic vestiges such as a leader (the king or queen) and bishops and the traditional rituals and liturgy - what Protestants derisively called the "smells and bells." Old habits die hard. When protestors said that "only 80 miles separated the new church from Catholicism," they meant that the short geographical distance from Dover, England to Calais, France mirrored the superficial differences between the Anglican and Catholic faiths. They didn't take down paintings. They still celebrated Christmas. Mainly the seat of power had just shifted from the Vatican to London.

Reformed Protestants wanted to take the country further in their direction and the new queen, Mary I, dealt with them harshly enough to earn the sobriquet "Bloody Mary." The name wasn't entirely accurate since she burned 300 Protestants Inquisition-style rather than the traditional English manner of dragging (drawing), near hanging, castration, disembowelment, and quartering (being chopped into four pieces). Thomas Cranmer, who'd helped Henry break away from Rome, was among her victims. A graphic little page-turner called the Book of Martyrs (1563) chronicled Bloody Mary's butchery, becoming the second-most-read book in colonial America after the Bible. Under Mary, England rejoined the Catholic Church and she cemented ties with Catholic Spain by marrying Philip II, Charles V's son.

After Mary died from cancer her step-sister Elizabeth (Henry and Anne Boleyn's daughter) vied for the throne with her Scottish first cousin once-removed Mary Stuart (aka Mary, Queen of Scots). Catholics in Britain and across Europe hoped that Mary Queen of Scots would win out and establish a dynasty through her marriage to young Frances II of France. A Papal Bull had excommunicated Elizabeth as a heretical bastard child after Henry beheaded her mother, Anne Boleyn. Elizabeth spent time imprisoned in the Tower of London. But Elizabeth got the upper hand after Frances' death, imprisoned Mary Stuart for eighteen years, and eventually signed her death warrant after becoming convinced that Mary was conspiring to overthrow her. The following account reveals how Mary's upset, confused dog witnessed the execution. Elizabeth went easier on Catholics than Bloody Mary had on Protestants, usually letting them practice as long as they laid low, plead their oath, and paid their taxes to the Church of England. According to the law of the land, though, outright Catholic priests could be tortured and executed.

Treachery often accompanied transitions of power in the monarchical system of dynastic succession (inherited power), just as it had in Classical Rome and throughout medieval England. If the 16th and 17th centuries weren't bad enough, the late 15th was a similarly chaotic bloodbath known as the Wars of the Roses. On the bright side, such politics spiced up plots ranging from William Shakespeare's plays to Showtime's The Tudors (2007-2010) to PBS's Secrets of the Six Wives (2017), based on Henry VIII's reign. However, if such treacherous soap operatics seem tedious and confusing and you're consulting your course catalog to re-check what class you signed up for, remember that you don't have to know many details about the Tudor and Stuart monarchies for the upcoming exam. Your author recounts this sordid tale mainly so that you get the picture as to why Americans starting a new country from scratch in 1776 saw fit to avoid the chronic violence of hereditary rule and to separate church and state.

Moreover, Elizabeth's rivalry with Spain had a lot to do with colonial America's settlement. Queen Elizabeth was a moderate but resolute Protestant and Catholic Spain tried to lure her into a marriage to mitigate her influence. She refused, instead aiding Dutch Protestants as they fought to drive Spain from the Low Countries of northwest Europe. She re-severed England's Catholic ties with her Act of Supremacy leading the papacy to encourage her assassination. Today, that's the sort of thing you'd expect the Taliban to do to infidels but, in the 16th century, such intrigue was common fare in Europe.

With Mary Queen of Scots dead and their hopes of an English alliance dashed, the spurned Spanish proceeded with plans to conquer England and overthrow Elizabeth. Philip II, the Hapsburg King of Spain, assembled the largest (navy) yet built. Under the Duke of Medina Sidonia, it sailed from Cadiz for the British Isles in 1588 hoping to pick up seasoned soldiers in the Low Countries. They encountered several obstacles in the English Channel, including excellent fortifications that Elizabeth's father Henry had built along the coastline and, most importantly, bad weather. England's fledgling navy had cast iron guns that, unlike Spain's, didn't overheat and they and the Dutch set fishing boats on fire and used them to set ablaze the larger Spanish ships (the floating torches were called hellebranders, hellburners or fireships). Elizabeth rallied the troops with a speech on the coast at Tilbury that English schoolchildren still recite, depicted in the red circle in the painting below. After three weeks of high casualties in the Channel, the disastrous Spanish expedition finally ended with the Armada's remnants sailing north all the way around Scotland and shipwrecking on the Irish coast.

For Elizabeth, the storm in the English Channel was "God's breath," similar (for historians) to the Divine Wind in Japanese tradition that defended that island from Chinese invaders in the 13th century. The conclusion in England's case was obvious: God preferred Protestants to Catholics. This unfolded right when England coveted the riches Spain was plundering from America and now they wanted some for themselves. Under Elizabeth, Protestantism cloaked England's patriotic identity and their religion's superiority justified why America should be theirs, not Spain's. Elizabeth's approval ratings were probably soaring at this point, though it's hard to tell because she outlawed free press criticism and polling didn't exist. England defeated the Spanish again outside Cadiz in 1596. England's colonizing efforts had barely begun when Elizabeth died childless in 1603. Power passed to Mary Queen of Scot's son, James Stuart (James VI of Scotland and, now, James I of England). The House of Tudor gave way to the House of Stuart.

Under James I and his successor Charles I, the center didn't hold in England religiously. The Church of England vacillated, leaving neither Catholics nor Protestants satisfied. James relied on Catholic support throughout Europe to lay claim to the crown after Elizabeth's death and promised increased tolerance toward Catholics as long as they continued to lay low and pay their taxes. However, it wasn't enough and, in 1605, Catholic terrorists led by Robert Catesby and Guy Fawkes tried unsuccessfully to "blow King and the whole company (Parliament) when they should there assemble (in Parliament)" with 36 barrels of gunpowder stashed in a basement vault under Westminster Palace, connected by tunnel to an adjacent house. Authorities caught wind of the plan and discovered the explosives before they went off, catching Fawkes red-handed near the unlit fuse. For centuries afterward, including in colonial America, Protestants celebrated the failed Gunpowder Plot - often with either the Pope or Fawkes burned in effigy - and England still celebrates what's evolved into Bonfire Night on November 5th.

With Catholics on the defensive, Protestants transcribed the Bible and the King James Version is still the most famous and authoritative in the English language. Then, in the "Catholic Drift" under Charles I persecution toward extreme Protestants (Reformed Calvinists) reared its ugly head once more. Yet, as that was happening, England's conquest of neighboring Ireland emboldened Protestants because of Ireland's Catholicism. Exaggerated reports of violence against English soldiers in Ulster (Northern Ireland), made possible by the recently freed press, stoked a patriotic Protestantism similar to what the Spanish Armada had. One of the military leaders in charge of suppressing the Irish, Oliver Cromwell, rose quickly in popularity and eventually took over England. According to the Calvinists' reading of the Book of Daniel, kings who ruled in an ungodly fashion had to be overthrown and Charles had dissolved Parliament, justifying Cromwell's takeover.

The English Civil Wars (1642-1651) between Cromwell's Parliamentarian-Protestant Roundheads and Royalist Cavaliers resulted in Charles I's decapitation and an 11-year interim known as the Commonwealth, a republic with no monarchy and Cromwell serving as leader until his son took over after his death. Roundheads took their defeat of Charles as evidence that he wasn't divinely ordained. Protestant onlookers soaked their handkerchiefs in Charles' blood to symbolize the purification of their revolution. While the monarchy returned in 1660 to Charles' son, Charles II during the Restoration, English kings never regained the absolute forms of dictatorship enjoyed by other European leaders. Especially after another uprising known as the Glorious Revolution of 1688, they had to share power with an increasingly powerful parliament and ministers.

These early republican revolutions in England set the stage for the American uprising a century later, when colonial rebel leaders needed to look no further than their country's history for seeds of their own revolution, tracing even back to the Magna Carta of the 13th century. But republicanism as yearned for and practiced in colonial America originated in the English Reformation.

America Bound
In the midst of the English turmoil, a small group of reformed Protestant Pilgrims had seen enough and slipped away across the big pond to America on the Mayflower, aiming for but missing Virginia. Today 1/30 Americans share some DNA with passengers aboard the Mayflower. Another larger group of more mainstream Puritans followed a decade later. Leaving during the reigns of James I and Charles I, these Calvinists missed out on the dramatic English Civil War of the Cromwell era but founded colonies in New England that later became part of the United States. Their colony of Massachusetts instigated the Revolutionary War against England 150 years later. We'll trace their story in more detail in coming chapters.

The Reformation impacted these colonists and others in many ways. The Renaissance was important because it gave rise to the navigational technology and mercantilist economics that drove Europeans overseas in pursuit of material wealth. The Reformation, though, inspired missionaries and religious refugees to come to America, augmented a rivalry with Spain that inspired England to claim Virginia, and inspired Calvinists to settle New England. Protestants also put a premium on earning worldly wealth, dovetailing their religious motivations to colonize with the economic motivations detailed in Chapter 2. American colonists were familiar with the English Civil War in which Protestant republicans rose up and challenged a monarchy, laying a foundation for the American Revolution the following century. American Protestants often suspected "papist" Catholic colonists in Canada, Maryland or elsewhere of conspiring against them with Indians, adding another complication to frontier warfare.

Even aside from the English Civil War, the Reformation encouraged democratic revolt against authority and Protestants thrived in areas of Europe like Switzerland and the Netherlands that contained small pockets of republican rule. These were the same areas, along with England, that embraced capitalism. By freeing the soul from the Catholic Church, Martin Luther had unleashed individual freedom and the prospect of questioning all forms of absolute authority. Just as Luther rebelled against the top-down authority and divinity of the Pope, Dissenters in both England and colonial America rebelled against the divinely ordained authority of the monarchy. English monarchs, after all, were anointed by Bishops in Westminster Abbey, not appointed by ministers in the Palace of Westminster. Protestants also emphasized equality among worshippers and that carried over into a similar emphasis on equality that slowly but surely worked its way into American politics between its Revolution and the 21st century.

American Protestants developed a greater sense of religious freedom than their European counterparts. While the early settlers were far from tolerant in the modern sense of the term and maintained generally anti-Catholic, anti-Quaker and anti-Semitic views, religious pluralism made America fertile soil for long-term toleration. To wit: there were so many different groups that it was in everyone's best interest to get along; otherwise, their own group could easily be the next target of discrimination, just as it likely had already been the target at some point previously. It took a long time, though, for that new dynamic to play out. For one thing, despite pluralism among Puritans, Quakers, Baptists, free-thinkers, etc., English law still applied in the British colonies. All landholders still had to pay a (or tax) to the Church of England regardless of their faith.

Such laws continued within various states even after American independence. Yet, in 1790, 183 years after the Mayflower landing, the first American president George Washington wrote a letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island guaranteeing their full citizenship. The "father of the country" boldly stated that the U.S. government offered "to bigotry no sanction, and to persecution no assistance...Everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree [sic], and there shall be none to make him afraid." Washington not only disliked religious intolerance, he idealistically even hoped that tolerance would become obsolete because the concept implied the potential power or desire of one group to dominate another. He didn't take this stance lightly, telling a British historian, "I walk on untrodden ground."

Many of the early state governments didn't comply with those ideals, continuing to charge tithes of their own and denying full citizenship to Jews, Catholics, Deists, and Atheists. But the national government set a very high standard in comparison to most of the states, to say nothing of what went on in England and Europe in previous centuries. Washington's words were a far cry from Martin Luther's in On the Jews and Their Lies. After passage of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 American states had to fall in line with the full-blown religious freedom guaranteed in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Dozens of Protestant denominations, including Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists, Church of Christ, and Mormons, would put their own distinctly American stamp on the Reformation. What they didn't impact as directly as some people argue is the founding of the United States as an official, legally Christian nation, and neither can we connect the New England Pilgrims to the founding as easily as some might try to. New England's colonial history was well known, important, and influential to the Founders, some of whom shared their views. But New England was just one of several colonial regions, and Pennsylvania and Virginia pioneered models of religious freedom that influenced the Constitution more than Pilgrim/Puritan society. The Pilgrims' sense of religious freedom is overrated unless one defines freedom merely as the desire to not be discriminated against. That sense of religious freedom is cheap, though, considering that everyone in the world, past or present, would agree with it. Compared to Massachusetts, colonists in Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Maryland, and (eventually) Virginia set a higher, more meaningful standard of religious freedom - defined not just as fleeing one's own persecution but as living alongside and not persecuting those with different views. Virginians James Madison and Thomas Jefferson co-authored the First Amendment to the Constitution in 1791 and Jefferson, as president, coined the phrase "separation of church and state" that future judges used to interpret the amendment.

Pilgrims and Puritans would not have approved of such religious liberty and, moreover, weren't involved in founding the United States. While we don't dwell on exact dates much in history classes anymore, it's important to realize that the Pilgrims settled New England 150 years before anyone ever conceived of the United States. For perspective: nearly as much time transpired between the First Thanksgiving and the Declaration of Independence as between ourselves and the Civil War. The Pilgrims were important in shaping American identity, though, and the Reformation continued to influence America in significant ways through the founding up to the present. Other Americans in other colonies established the sort of religious freedom Americans rightfully cherish today.

Optional Reading:
"The Separation of Church & State Is Rooted In American Christianity," Johann Neem
Manifold Greatness: the Creation & Afterlife of the King James Bible (NEH)
"Join the Army & Choose Whichever God You Like," Sarah Vowell, NYT 8.12.16
"The Gunpowder Plot," Pauline Croft, History Review 52 (9.2005)

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We need to understand some basics about Christian history to understand colonial, Revolutionary, and 19th century America. We won't delve far into theology or matters of faith, but some basic church history will help explain the Protestant Reformation: a major schism within Christianity that changed history in ways so embedded in the Western world that they're easy to overlook or take for granted.

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This website is legit because It is an educational website, It looks professional, The author is stated, The site contains no typos and errors, there is a bibliography, there is a  date for publication/revision, The information is in depth."The pre- and post-revolutionary era in American history generated propitious conditions for Enlightenment thought to thrive on an order comparable to that witnessed in the European Enlightenment."

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Although there is no consensus about the exact span of time that corresponds to the American Enlightenment, it is safe to say that it occurred during the eighteenth century among thinkers in British North America and the early United States and was inspired by the ideas of the British and French Enlightenments. Based on the metaphor of bringing light to the Dark Age, the Age of the Enlightenment ( Siècle des lumières in French and Aufklärung in German) shifted allegiances away from absolute authority, whether religious or political, to more skeptical and optimistic attitudes about human nature, religion and politics. In the American context, thinkers such as Thomas Paine, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin invented and adopted revolutionary ideas about scientific rationality, religious toleration and experimental political organization-ideas that would have far-reaching effects on the development of the fledgling nation. Some coupled science and religion in the notion of deism; others asserted the natural rights of man in the anti-authoritarian doctrine of liberalism; and still others touted the importance of cultivating virtue, enlightened leadership and community in early forms of republican thinking. At least six ideas came to punctuate American Enlightenment thinking: deism, liberalism, republicanism, conservatism, toleration and scientific progress. Many of these were shared with European Enlightenment thinkers, but in some instances took a uniquely American form.

Table of Contents

1. Enlightenment Age Thinking

The pre- and post-revolutionary era in American history generated propitious conditions for Enlightenment thought to thrive on an order comparable to that witnessed in the European Enlightenments. In the pre-revolutionary years, Americans reacted to the misrule of King George III, the unfairness of Parliament ("taxation without representation") and exploitative treatment at the hands of a colonial power: the English Empire. The Englishman-cum-revolutionary Thomas Paine wrote the famous pamphlet The Rights of Man, decrying the abuses of the North American colonies by their English masters. In the post-revolutionary years, a whole generation of American thinkers would found a new system of government on liberal and republican principles, articulating their enduring ideas in documents such as the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers and the United States Constitution.

Although distinctive features arose in the eighteenth-century American context, much of the American Enlightenment was continuous with parallel experiences in British and French society. Four themes recur in both European and American Enlightenment texts: modernization, skepticism, reason and liberty. Modernization means that beliefs and institutions based on absolute moral, religious and political authority (such as the divine right of kings and the Ancien Régime) will become increasingly eclipsed by those based on science, rationality and religious pluralism. Many Enlightenment thinkers-especially the French philosophes, such as Voltaire, Rousseau and Diderot-subscribed to some form of skepticism, doubting appeals to miraculous, transcendent and supernatural forces that potentially limit the scope of individual choice and reason. Reason that is universally shared and definitive of the human nature also became a dominant theme in Enlightenment thinkers' writings, particularly Immanuel Kant's "What is Enlightenment?" and his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. The fourth theme, liberty and rights assumed a central place in theories of political association, specifically as limits state authority originating prior to the advent of states (that is, in a state of nature) and manifesting in social contracts, especially in John Locke's Second Treatise on Civil Government and Thomas Jefferson's drafts of the Declaration of Independence.

a. Moderate and Radical

Besides identifying dominant themes running throughout the Enlightenment period, some historians, such as Henry May and Jonathan Israel, understand Enlightenment thought as divisible into two broad categories, each reflecting the content and intensity of ideas prevalent at the time. The moderate Enlightenment signifies commitments to economic liberalism, religious toleration and constitutional politics. In contrast to its moderate incarnation, the radical Enlightenment conceives enlightened thought through the prism of revolutionary rhetoric and classical Republicanism. Some commentators argue that the British Enlightenment (especially figures such as James Hutton, Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith) was essentially moderate, while the French (represented by Denis Diderot, Claude Adrien Helvétius and François Marie Arouet) was decidedly more radical. Influenced as it was by the British and French, American Enlightenment thought integrates both moderate and radical elements.

b. Chronology

American Enlightenment thought can also be appreciated chronologically, or in terms of three temporal stages in the development of Enlightenment Age thinking. The early stage stretches from the time of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 to 1750, when members of Europe's middle class began to break free from the monarchical and aristocratic regimes-whether through scientific discovery, social and political change or emigration outside of Europe, including America. The middle stage extends from 1751 to just a few years after the start of the American Revolution in 1779. It is characterized by an exploding fascination with science, religious revivalism and experimental forms of government, especially in the United States. The late stage begins in 1780 and ends with the rise of Napoléon Bonaparte, as the French Revolution comes to a close in 1815-a period in which the European Enlightenment was in decline, while the American Enlightenment reclaimed and institutionalized many of its seminal ideas. However, American Enlightenment thinkers were not always of a single mind with their European counterparts. For instance, several American Enlightenment thinkers-particularly James Madison and John Adams, though not Benjamin Franklin-judged the French philosophes to be morally degenerate intellectuals of the era.

c. Democracy and the Social Contract

Many European and American Enlightenment figures were critical of democracy. Skepticism about the value of democratic institutions was likely a legacy of Plato's belief that democracy led to tyranny and Aristotle's view that democracy was the best of the worst forms of government. John Adams and James Madison perpetuated the elitist and anti-democratic idea that to invest too much political power in the hands of uneducated and property-less people was to put society at constant risk of social and political upheaval. Although several of America's Enlightenment thinkers condemned democracy, others were more receptive to the idea of popular rule as expressed in European social contract theories. Thomas Jefferson was strongly influenced by John Locke's social contract theory, while Thomas Paine found inspiration in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's. In the Two Treatises on Government (1689 and 1690), Locke argued against the divine right of kings and in favor of government grounded on the consent of the governed; so long as people would have agreed to hand over some of their liberties enjoyed in a pre-political society or state of nature in exchange for the protection of basic rights to life, liberty and property. However, if the state reneged on the social contract by failing to protect those natural rights, then the people had a right to revolt and form a new government. Perhaps more of a democrat than Locke, Rousseau insisted in The Social Contract (1762) that citizens have a right of self-government, choosing the rules by which they live and the judges who shall enforce those rules. If the relationship between the will of the state and the will of the people (the "general will") is to be democratic, it should be mediated by as few institutions as possible.

2. Six Key Ideas

At least six ideas came to punctuate American Enlightenment thinking: deism, liberalism, republicanism, conservatism, toleration and scientific progress. Many of these were shared with European Enlightenment thinkers, but in some instances took a uniquely American form.

a. Deism

European Enlightenment thinkers conceived tradition, custom and prejudice ( Vorurteil) as barriers to gaining true knowledge of the universal laws of nature. The solution was deism or understanding God's existence as divorced from holy books, divine providence, revealed religion, prophecy and miracles; instead basing religious belief on reason and observation of the natural world. Deists appreciated God as a reasonable Deity. A reasonable God endowed humans with rationality in order that they might discover the moral instructions of the universe in the natural law. God created the universal laws that govern nature, and afterwards humans realize God's will through sound judgment and wise action. Deists were typically (though not always) Protestants, sharing a disdain for the religious dogmatism and blind obedience to tradition exemplified by the Catholic Church. Rather than fight members of the Catholic faith with violence and intolerance, most deists resorted to the use of tamer weapons such as humor and mockery.

Both moderate and radical American Enlightenment thinkers, such as James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams and George Washington, were deists. Some struggled with the tensions between Calvinist orthodoxy and deist beliefs, while other subscribed to the populist version of deism advanced by Thomas Paine in The Age of Reason. Franklin was remembered for stating in the Constitutional Convention that "the longer I live, the more convincing proof I see of this truth-that God governs in the affairs of men." In what would become known as the Jefferson Bible (originally The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth), Jefferson chronicles the life and times of Jesus Christ from a deist perspective, eliminating all mention of miracles or divine intervention. God for deists such as Jefferson never loomed large in humans' day-to-day life beyond offering a moral or humanistic outlook and the resource of reason to discover the content of God's laws. Despite the near absence of God in human life, American deists did not deny His existence, largely because the majority of the populace still remained strongly religious, traditionally pious and supportive of the good works (for example monasteries, religious schools and community service) that the clergy did.

b. Liberalism

Another idea central to American Enlightenment thinking is liberalism, that is, the notion that humans have natural rights and that government authority is not absolute, but based on the will and consent of the governed. Rather than a radical or revolutionary doctrine, liberalism was rooted in the commercial harmony and tolerant Protestantism embraced by merchants in Northern Europe, particularly Holland and England. Liberals favored the interests of the middle class over those of the high-born aristocracy, an outlook of tolerant pluralism that did not discriminate between consumers or citizens based on their race or creed, a legal system devoted to the protection of private property rights, and an ethos of strong individualism over the passive collectivism associated with feudal arrangements. Liberals also preferred rational argumentation and free exchange of ideas to the uncritical of religious doctrine or governmental mandates. In this way, liberal thinking was anti-authoritarian. Although later liberalism became associated with grassroots democracy and a sharp separation of the public and private domains, early liberalism favored a parliamentarian form of government that protected liberty of expression and movement, the right to petition the government, separation of church and state and the confluence of public and private interests in philanthropic and entrepreneurial endeavors.

The claim that private individuals have fundamental God-given rights, such as to property, life, liberty and to pursue their conception of good, begins with the English philosopher John Locke, but also finds expression in Thomas Jefferson's drafting of the Declaration of Independence. The U.S. Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution, guarantees a schedule of individual rights based on the liberal ideal. During the constitutional convention, James Madison responded to the anti-Federalists' demand for a bill of rights as a condition of ratification by reviewing over two-hundred proposals and distilling them into an initial list of twelve suggested amendments to the Constitution, covering the rights of free speech, religious liberty, right to bear arms and habeas corpus, among others. While ten of those suggested were ratified in 1791, one missing amendment (stopping laws created by Congress to increase its members' salaries from taking effect until the next legislative term) would have to wait until 1992 to be ratified as the Twenty-seventh Amendment. Madison's concern that the Bill of Rights should apply not only to the federal government would eventually be accommodated with the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment (especially its due process clause) in 1868 and a series of Supreme Court cases throughout the twentieth-century interpreting each of the ten amendments as "incorporated" and thus protecting citizens against state governments as well.

c. Republicanism

Classical republicanism is a commitment to the notion that a nation ought to be ruled as a republic, in which selection of the state's highest public official is determined by a general election, rather than through a claim to hereditary right. Republican values include civic patriotism, virtuous citizenship and property-based personality. Developed during late antiquity and early renaissance, classic republicanism differed from early liberalism insofar as rights were not thought to be granted by God in a pre-social state of nature, but were the products of living in political society. On the classical republican view of liberty, citizens exercise freedom within the context of existing social relations, historical associations and traditional communities, not as autonomous individuals set apart from their social and political ties. In this way, liberty for the classical republican is positively defined by the political society instead of negatively defined in terms of the pre-social individual's natural rights.

While prefigured by the European Enlightenment, the American Enlightenment also promoted the idea that a nation should be governed as a republic, whereby the state's head is popularly elected, not appointed through a hereditary blood-line. As North American colonists became increasingly convinced that British rule was corrupt and inimical to republican values, they joined militias and eventually formed the American Continental Army under George Washington's command. The Jeffersonian ideal of the yeoman farmer, which had its roots in the similar Roman ideal, represented the eighteenth-century American as both a hard-working agrarian and as a citizen-soldier devoted to the republic. When elected to the highest office of the land, George Washington famously demurred when offered a royal title, preferring instead the more republican title of President. Though scholarly debate persists over the relative importance of liberalism and republicanism during the American Revolution and Founding (see Recent Work section), the view that republican ideas were a formative influence on American Enlightenment thinking has gained widespread acceptance.

d. Conservatism

Though the Enlightenment is more often associated with liberalism and republicanism, an undeniable strain of conservatism emerged in the last stage of the Enlightenment, mainly as a reaction to the excesses of the French Revolution. In 1790 Edmund Burkeanticipated the dissipation of order and decency in French society following the revolution (often referred to as "the Terror") in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. Though it is argued that Burkean conservatism was a reaction to the Enlightenment (or anti-Enlightenment), conservatives were also operating within the framework of Enlightenment ideas. Some Enlightenment claims about human nature are turned back upon themselves and shown to break down when applied more generally to human culture. For instance, Enlightenment faith in universal declarations of human rights do more harm than good when they contravene the conventions and traditions of specific nations, regions and localities. Similar to the classical republicans, Burke believed that human personality was the product of living in a political society, not a set of natural rights that predetermined our social and political relations. Conservatives attacked the notion of a social contract (prominent in the work of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau) as a mythical construction that overlooked the plurality of groups and perspectives in society, a fact which made brokering compromises inevitable and universal consent impossible. Burke only insisted on a tempered version, not a wholesale rejection of Enlightenment values.

Conservatism featured strongly in American Enlightenment thinking. While Burke was critical of the French Revolution, he supported the American Revolution for disposing of English colonial misrule while creatively readapting British traditions and institutions to the American temperament. American Enlightenment thinkers such as James Madison and John Adams held views that echoed and in some cases anticipated Burkean conservatism, leading them to criticize the rise of revolutionary France and the popular pro-French Jacobin clubs during and after the French Revolution. In the forty-ninth Federalist Paper, James Madison deployed a conservative argument against frequent appeals to democratic publics on constitutional questions because they threatened to undermine political stability and substitute popular passion for the "enlightened reason" of elected representatives. Madison's conservative view was opposed to Jefferson's liberal view that a constitutional convention should be convened every twenty years, for "[t]he earth belongs to the living generation," and so each new generation should be empowered to reconsider its constitutional norms.

e. Toleration

Toleration or tolerant pluralism was also a major theme in American Enlightenment thought. Tolerance of difference developed in parallel with the early liberalism prevalent among Northern Europe's merchant class. It reflected their belief that hatred or fear of other races and creeds interfered with economic trade, extinguished freedom of thought and expression, eroded the basis for friendship among nations and led to persecution and war. Tiring of religious wars (particularly as the 16 th century French wars of religion and the 17 th century Thirty Years War), European Enlightenment thinkers imagined an age in which enlightened reason not religious dogmatism governed relations between diverse peoples with loyalties to different faiths. The Protestant Reformation and the Treaty of Westphalia significantly weakened the Catholic Papacy, empowered secular political institutions and provided the conditions for independent nation-states to flourish.

American thinkers inherited this principle of tolerant pluralism from their European Enlightenment forebearers. Inspired by the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers John Knox and George Buchanan, American Calvinists created open, friendly and tolerant institutions such as the secular public school and democratically organized religion (which became the Presbyterian Church). Many American Enlightenment thinkers, including Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, read and agreed with John Locke's A Letter Concerning Toleration. In it, Locke argued that government is ill-equipped to judge the rightness or wrongness of opposing religious doctrines, faith could not be coerced and if attempted the result would be greater religious and political discord. So, civil government ought to protect liberty of conscience, the right to worship as one chooses (or not to worship at all) and refrain from establishing an official state-sanctioned church. For America's founders, the fledgling nation was to be a land where persons of every faith or no faith could settle and thrive peacefully and cooperatively without fear of persecution by government or fellow citizens. Ben Franklin's belief that religion was an aid to cultivating virtue led him to donate funds to every church in Philadelphia. Defending freedom of conscience, James Madison would write that "[c]onscience is the most sacred of all property." In 1777, Thomas Jefferson drafted a religious liberty bill for Virginia to disestablish the government-sponsored Anglican Church-often referred to as "the precursor to the Religion Clauses of the First Amendment"-which eventually passed with James Madison's help.

f. Scientific Progress

The Enlightenment enthusiasm for scientific discovery was directly related to the growth of deism and skepticism about received religious doctrine. Deists engaged in scientific inquiry not only to satisfy their intellectual curiosity, but to respond to a divine calling to expose God's natural laws. Advances in scientific knowledge-whether the rejection of the geocentric model of the universe because of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo's work or the discovery of natural laws such as Newton's mathematical explanation of gravity-removed the need for a constantly intervening God. With the release of Sir Isaac Newton's Principia in 1660, faith in scientific progress took institutional form in the Royal Society of England, the Académie des Sciences in France and later the Academy of Sciences in Germany. In pre-revolutionary America, scientists or natural philosophers belonged to the Royal Society until 1768, when Benjamin Franklin helped create and then served as the first president of the American Philosophical Society. Franklin became one of the most famous American scientists during the Enlightenment period because of his many practical inventions and his theoretical work on the properties of electricity.

3. Four American Enlightenment Thinkers

What follows are brief accounts of how four significant thinkers contributed to the eighteenth-century American Enlightenment: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and John Adams.

a. Franklin

Benjamin Franklin, the author, printer, scientist and statesman who led America through a tumultuous period of colonial politics, a revolutionary war and its momentous, though no less precarious, founding as a nation. In his Autobiography, he extolled the virtues of thrift, industry and money-making (or acquisitiveness). For Franklin, the self-interested pursuit of material wealth is only virtuous when it coincides with the promotion of the public good through philanthropy and voluntarism-what is often called "enlightened self-interest." He believed that reason, free trade and a cosmopolitan spirit serve as faithful guides for nation-states to cultivate peaceful relations. Within nation-states, Franklin thought that "independent entrepreneurs make good citizens" because they pursue "attainable goals" and are "capable of living a useful and dignified life." In his autobiography, Franklin claims that the way to "moral perfection" is to cultivate thirteen virtues (temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, and humility) as well as a healthy dose of "cheerful prudence." Franklin favored voluntary associations over governmental institutions as mechanisms to channel citizens' extreme individualism and isolated pursuit of private ends into productive social outlets. Not only did Franklin advise his fellow citizens to create and join these associations, but he also founded and participated in many himself. Franklin was a staunch defender of federalism, a critic of narrow parochialism, a visionary leader in world politics and a strong advocate of religious liberty.

b. Jefferson

A Virginian statesman, scientist and diplomat, Jefferson is probably best known for drafting the Declaration of Independence. Agreeing with Benjamin Franklin, he substituted "pursuit of happiness" for "property" in Locke's schedule of natural rights, so that liberty to pursue the widest possible human ends would be accommodated. Jefferson also exercised immense influence over the creation of the United States' Constitution through his extended correspondence with James Madison during the 1787 Constitutional Convention (since Jefferson was absent, serving as a diplomat in Paris). Just as Jefferson saw the Declaration as a test of the colonists' will to revolt and separate from Britain, he also saw the Convention in Philadelphia, almost eleven years later, as a grand experiment in creating a new constitutional order. Panel four of the Jefferson Memorial records how Thomas Jefferson viewed constitutions: "I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times." Jefferson's words capture the spirit of organic constitutionalism, the idea that constitutions are living documents that transform over time in pace with popular thought, imagination and opinion.

c. Madison

Heralded as the "Father of the Constitution," James Madison was, besides one of the most influential architects of the U.S. Constitution, a man of letters, a politician, a scientist and a diplomat who left an enduring legacy on American philosophical thought. As a tireless advocate for the ratification of the Constitution, Madison advanced his most groundbreaking ideas in his jointly authoring The Federalist Papers with John Jay and Alexander Hamilton. Indeed, two of his most enduring ideas-the large republic thesis and the argument for separation-of-powers and checks-and-balances-are contained there. In the tenth Federalist paper, Madison explains the problem of factions, namely, that the development of groups with shared interests (advocates or interest groups) is inevitable and dangerous to republican government. If we try to vanquish factions, then we will in turn destroy the liberty upon which their existence and activities are founded. Baron d' Montesquieu, the seventeenth-century French philosopher, believed that the only way to have a functioning republic, one that was sufficiently democratic, was for it to be small, both in population and land mass (on the order of Ancient Athens or Sparta). He then argues that a large and diverse republic will stop the formation of a majority faction; if small groups cannot communicate over long distances and coordinate effectively, the threat will be negated and liberty will be preserved ("you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens"). When factions formed inside the government, a clever institutional design of checks and balances (first John Adams's idea, where each branch would have a hand in the others' domain) would avert excessive harm, so that "ambition must be made to counteract ambition" and, consequently, government will effectively "control itself."

d. Adams

John Adams was also a founder, statesman, diplomat and eventual President who contributed to American Enlightenment thought. Among his political writings, three stand out: Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law (1776), A Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, Against the Attack of M. Turgot (1787-8), and Discourses on Davila (1791). In the Dissertation, Adams faults Great Britain for deciding to introduce canon and feudal law, "the two greatest systems of tyranny," to the North American colonies. Once introduced, elections ceased in the North American colonies, British subjects felt enslaved and revolution became inevitable. In the Defense, Adams offers an uncompromising defense of republicanism. He disputes Turgot's apology for unified and centralized government, arguing that insurance against consolidated state power and support for individual liberty require separating government powers between branches and installing careful checks and balances. Nevertheless, a strong executive branch is needed to defend the people against "aristocrats" who will attempt to deprive liberty from the mass of people. Revealing the Enlightenment theme of conservatism, Adams criticized the notion of unrestricted popular rule or pure democracy in the Discourses. Since humans are always desirous of increasing their personal power and reputation, all the while making invidious comparisons, government must be designed to constrain the effects of these passionate tendencies. Adams writes: "Consider that government is intended to set bounds to passions which nature has not limited; and to assist reason, conscience, justice, and truth in controlling interests which, without it, would be as unjust as uncontrollable."

4. Contemporary Work

Invocations of universal freedom draw their inspiration from Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke, Immanuel Kant, and Thomas Jefferson, but come into conflict with contemporary liberal appeals to multiculturalism and pluralism. Each of these Enlightenment thinkers sought to ground the legitimacy of the state on a theory of rational-moral political order reflecting universal truths about human nature-for instance, that humans are carriers of inalienable rights (Locke), autonomous agents (Kant), or fundamentally equal creations (Jefferson). However, many contemporary liberals-for instance, Graeme Garrard, John Gray and Richard Rorty-fault Enlightenment liberalism for its failure to acknowledge and accommodate the differences among citizens' incompatible and equally reasonable religious, moral and philosophical doctrines, especially in multicultural societies. According to these critics, Enlightenment liberalism, rather than offering a neutral framework, discloses a full-blooded doctrine that competes with alternative views of truth, the good life, and human nature. This pluralist critique of Enlightenment liberalism's universalism makes it difficult to harmonize the American Founders' appeal to universal human rights with their insistence on religious tolerance. However, as previously noted, evidence of Burkean conservatism offers an alternative to the strong universalism that these recent commentators criticize in American Enlightenment thought.

What in recent times has been characterized as the 'Enlightenment project' is the general idea that human rationality can and should be made to serve ethical and humanistic ends. If human societies are to achieve genuine moral progress, parochialism, dogma and prejudice ought to give way to science and reason in efforts to solve pressing problems. The American Enlightenment project signifies how America has taken a leading role in promoting Enlightenment ideals during that period of human history commonly referred to as 'modernity.' Still, there is no consensus about the exact legacy of American Enlightenment thinkers-for instance, whether republican or liberal ideas are predominant. Until the publication of J. G. A. Pocock's The Machiavellian Moment (1975), most scholars agreed that liberal (especially Lockean) ideas were more dominant than republican ones. Pockock's work initiated a sea change towards what is now the widely accepted view that liberal and republican ideas had relatively equal sway during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, both in America and Europe. Gordon Wood and Bernard Bailyn contend that republicanism was dominant and liberalism recessive in American Enlightenment thought. Isaac Kramnick still defends the orthodox position that American Enlightenment thinking was exclusively Lockean and liberal, thus explaining the strongly individualistic character of modern American culture.

5. References and Further Reading

Bailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1967.

Ferguson, Robert A. The American Enlightenment. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.

Hampson, Norman. The Enlightenment: An Evaluation of its Assumptions. London: Penguin, 1968.

Himmelfarb, Gertrude. The Roads to Modernity: The British, French and American Enlightenments. London: Vintage, 2008.

Israel, Jonathan. A Resolution of the Mind-Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.

Kramnick, Isaac. Age of Ideology: Political Thought, 1750 to the Present. New York: Prentice Hall, 1979.

May, Henry F. The Enlightenment in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978.

O'Brien, Conor Cruise. The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785-1800. London: Pimlico, 1998.

O'Hara, Kieron. The Enlightenment: A Beginner's Guide. Oxford: OneWorld, 2010.

Pockock, John G. A. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the American Republican Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975.

Wilson, Ellen J. and Peter H. Reill. Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment. New York: Book Builders Inc., 2004.

Wood, Gordon. The Creation of the American Republic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969.

Author Information

Shane J. Ralston
Email: sjr21@psu.edu
Pennsylvania State University
U. S. A.

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Although there is no consensus about the exact span of time that corresponds to the American Enlightenment, it is safe to say that it occurred during the eighteenth century among thinkers in British North America and the early United States and was inspired by the ideas of the British and French Enlightenments.