Religion and Morality in John Adams’s Eighteenth Century
Imperfect Union January 2022
Church of the Presidents, Quincy, Massachusetts
Ok, so last week I unintentionally started a bit of a Twitter firestorm when I shared a quote that I had read in Fears of a Setting Sun: The Disillusionment of America’s Founders by Dennis C. Rasmussen. Here is the original tweet:
This month, 227 years ago, John Adams wrote to Abigail Adams: "Our Constitution was made only for a moral...People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." True on January 27, 1795, true today.
After the tweet had been up for about 10 hours, a few accounts got a hold of it, and I was bombarded by (what looked like a pretty strategic) campaign. At best, these accounts noted the full quote wasn’t included. At worst, they accused of me of trying to cancel Christianity. A power I assure you I do not have.
While I mostly elected not to respond and eventually locked the tweets to try and minimize the vitriol, I thought a more fulsome discussion would be really helpful. Especially as several people asked genuinely thoughtful questions. As much as I love Twitter, this sort of discourse isn’t always possible in 280 characters and readers often don’t look past the first tweet in a thread. Essays really are best for some things.
A few caveats before I begin. I did make one mistake in that I misread the footnote of the original source. The letter wasn’t to Abigail, John sent it to the Massachusetts Militia on October 11, 1798. You can read the full letter here. Twitter moves fast and mistakes will be made by all and I’m happy to own mine.
Second, any conversation about religion is tricky. It’s one of those third rail subjects in American politics, like immigration and abortion, and is infused with so many personal experiences and faiths. It can be difficult to talk about the subject without causing insult or misunderstanding. I am going to do my very best to articulate my ideas slowly and with great care. If you would be willing to read the following information with that stated goal in mind, I’d be very grateful. I’m happy to answer questions and always welcome a respectful debate, but let’s all agree to take a deep breath before replying, deal?
With that important business out of the way, let’s get down to history. Here is the full Adams quote pulled from a much lengthier sentence in a longer letter:
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
As you can see from the original tweet, I omitted religious and inserted an ellipsis. Ellipses, I should note, are pretty common historical writing practice. Have you looked at 18th -century letters? Goodness gracious run on sentences! They didn’t have the same grammar norms that we do today and it’s not usual to see sentences run for full paragraphs. Which does not make for particularly compelling writing in the 21st century. The ellipsis marks the omission and is intended to convey to the reader that there is more detail in the sentence. It is not intended to erase words. Had I wanted to erase the word “religious” or hide it, I wouldn’t have been so darn obvious that I was doing so.
Before posting, I thought about including the whole quote and decided not to for two reasons. First, John Adams had a very different conception of “religious” than we do today. I will confess, I am not an expert on 18th-century religion, but one of the first things you learn when reading about Adams is his discomfort with religious establishments. He believed in a divine power, sometimes called providence, but rejected some of the more extreme Calvinist teachings of his ancestors. For example, “the concepts of predestination and limited atonement struck him as ‘frigid’ and irrational.”[1]
He wasn’t as extreme of a deist as Thomas Jefferson and he regularly attended church, but he attended lots of different types of churches depending on what was available to him—a pretty common practice in the 18th century. George Washington also attended many different churches, somewhat irregularly, and probably because of the social expectation of church attendance. Although there are nuances to all three men’s religious convictions, they shared the belief that religion was a personal, private experience. Their relationship with a higher power was not a political stance, had no business being party of a party platform, and was not something they discussed publicly.
When Adams wrote a religious people, he didn’t mean Catholics or Protestants or Christians. He did not mean that there should be one established religion. On the contrary, fighting against one established state religion was a key element of the Revolution.
As he wrote the Massachusetts Constitution, Adams was careful to include protections for all types of religion. Part I, Article II stated:
no subject shall be hurt, molested, or restrained, in his person, liberty, or estate, for worshipping God in the manner and season most agreeable to the dictates of his own conscience, or for his religious profession or sentiments, provided he doth not disturb the public peace or obstruct others in their religious worship.
Instead, Adams believed that if you didn’t adhere to some sort of private religious faith, you didn’t have a moral code. Religious moral teachings were the best way they knew how to organize a society. Think of it like this: religious morality was the carrot trying to induce good behavior, while laws were the stick to enforce decent behavior if the carrot failed to work. That central moral code was especially important in a republic with relatively limited central authority. If you don’t have a dictator imposing order, you needed something else.
I would argue that you could go so far as to say that the way Adams wrote the sentence, moral and religious are almost synonymous.
So when I was thinking about that initial quote, I frankly didn’t trust Twitter readers to hold all of this information and complexity in their brains. Not because I think people can’t understand this nuance, but rather when we are scrolling, myself included, we often don’t think about the history behind the quick message.
The second reason I omitted “religious” is the role of religious nationalism in the January 6 insurrection and militia movements in general. To be clear and let me say this very explicitly: I do not think all Christians support the insurrection or white supremacy. Instead, I think a radical minority have weaponized well-intentioned ideas for their own purposes.
Given that I posted the tweet the day before the one-year anniversary of the January 6 insurrection, I worried that the quote would be intentionally weaponized and used by insurrectionist supporters. The last thing I want to do is give ammunition to people trying to undermine our democracy.
I also didn’t want to engage in a debate about whether you need to attend church to be a citizen. Instead, I wanted to share Adams’s concerns that the Constitution wasn’t equipped to deal with non-moral people. To me, that is the driving point.
Anyway, that’s the full story. I hope it helps elucidate both the full quote and the thought that goes into public history. I am going to continue to think about this process and I’m grateful to you allowing me to explore that process in writing here on my newsletter. I’d welcome your thoughts and look forward to talking more history with you in 2022.
If you want to read more, I’d recommend a few articles:
"A Most Mild and Equitable Establishment of Religion" John Adams and the Massachusetts Experiment by John Witte, Jr. Journal of Church and State.
How Christian nationalism drove the insurrection: A religious history of Jan. 6 by Kathryn Joyce
Understanding Christian Nationalism: Is the Constitution in Trouble? By Dianne Post and Robert J. McWhirter
[1] Darren Staloff. Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson: The Politics of Enlightenment and the American Founding (2005), 138.