In God we trust?
Vt. minister targets religious myths in politics
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By KEVIN OCONNOR
Staff Writer - Published: February 17, 2008
"Does it matter if a candidate is Mormon, evangelical Christian or mistaken as Muslim? With the current cacophony of questions about what politicians believe, some Americans may yearn this Presidents Day for the simple piety of a statesman like George Washington.
The Rev. Gary Kowalski knows better.
The minister of Burlington's First Unitarian Universalist Society can tell you how the first president was arrested one Sunday in 1789 for not attending church. When Washington did speak of religion, the Episcopalian deliberately avoided using the word "God." Instead, the country's original commander in chief made official visits to a variety of congregations, including Catholic, Jewish, Methodist, Presbyterian and Quaker.
"Of all the animosities which have existed among mankind," Kowalski quotes Washington as saying, "those which are caused by differences of sentiments in religion appear to be the most inveterate and distressing."
The 54-year-old Harvard-educated minister can tell similar stories about the complex spiritual lives of historical heroes Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison and Thomas Paine. That's why he has written a new book, "Revolutionary Spirits: The Enlightened Faith of America's Founding Fathers," deemed by Publishers Weekly as an "elegantly written" look at the beliefs that serve as the nation's bedrock.
"You can't go very long without reading or hearing this general misperception that the United States is a Christian nation and the Founding Fathers were all devout believers in the Bible," Kowalski says in an interview. "Most Americans are uninformed that the founders were religiously unorthodox and unconventional."
That ignorance, the minister believes, is growing increasingly dangerous. His 1816 brick meeting house is the northern capstone and namesake of Church Street Marketplace, the teeming shopping thoroughfare of Vermont's largest city. But looking past his community's progressive spirituality and politics, Kowalski sees a national tug of war between "runaway secularism and resurgent fundamentalism."
"Unlike Iraq or the rest of the Middle East, we've been able to preserve a relative harmony by distancing political parties and religions," he says. "But the more these passions become tied together, the more opportunity we have for investing the political process with all the fervor and fanaticism that goes with religion. It lends itself to absolutism, and that's not healthy."
Deeds over creeds
Many Americans believe their ancestors were one-size-fits-all Pilgrims and Puritans who colonized New England in the 1600s. But Kowalski an Oklahoma native who ministered in Memphis and Seattle before moving to Vermont two decades ago reminds readers that the New World drew all types of religious refugees.
The 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence represented at least eight different religions, ranging from Congregationalists to Catholics. The Revolutionary army had soldiers from almost 20 faiths, from Moravians to Methodists, Priestleyans to Presbyterians.
That said, only one in eight settlers claimed membership in a church.
"The vast majority," Kowalski writes in his book, "were unchurched and not eager to submit to any ecclesiastical body that might restrict their personal liberty."
For them, America was all about freedom. And so began the Founding Fathers' challenge: Establish a government that satisfies the needs of everyone.
Religious debate today is often the stuff of broadcast talking heads who do little listening. But two centuries ago, Americans kept the volume low.
"They preferred to discuss theology in quiet tones, through appeals to reason and common sense, rather than in the pulpit-pounding cadences of the revivalist," Kowalski writes. "Mistrustful of emotions that could turn masses of people into heated mobs, they encouraged cool heads and critical thinking when it came to questions of faith."
Actions, he says, spoke louder than words or "deeds mattered more than creeds."
Politicians today may pigeonhole churchgoers as more conservative, but the nation's founders were "almost all religious liberals in the classic meaning of that term," Kowalski says. "A liberal is one who cherishes liberty, and freedom was never far from the founders' thoughts."
The country's creators not only read the Bible but also relied on the teachings of classical Greek and Roman thinkers and Confucius, favoring "fact-based arguments and testable hypotheses, trusting in the five senses more than the four evangelists or five books of Moses," the minister writes.
They also drew inspiration from nature, from farm soil to faraway stars.
"When they referred to a deity," Kowalski writes, "it was most often under the rubric of Chief Architect or Grand Designer the God revealed in the workings of earth and sky rather than the traditional God of Abraham and Isaac."
Sense over sound
Candidates today can find themselves boxed into simple stereotypes: Ask voters about Republican Mike Huckabee and many will limit their reply to "evangelical Christian." But each of the Founding Fathers had his own complicated take on religion.
Thomas Jefferson, for example, refused to act as godfather of his friends' children because he would have to recite the Apostles' Creed at their baptisms.
"Question with boldness even the existence of God," Kowalski quotes Jefferson as saying, "because, if there is one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear."
But Jefferson was a lifelong Episcopalian. And as the nation's third president said in his inaugural address: "I believe, with the Quaker preacher, that he who observes those moral precepts in which all religions concur, will never be questioned at the gates of heaven as to the dogmas in which they all differ."
Moving to Benjamin Franklin, Kowalski tells the story of how the town of Franklin, Mass., asked its namesake to donate a bell for the local church. Franklin, a philanthropist, told residents to build a library instead. To punctuate his point, he sent them "books instead of a bell, sense being preferable to sound."
Yet in Philadelphia, Franklin helped found a nondenominational religious group that hosted preachers unwelcome in other churches.
"If the Mufti of Constantinople were to send a missionary to preach Mahometanism to us," Franklin wrote in his autobiography, "he would find a pulpit at his service."
That's not necessarily the case today. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, facing misperceptions that he's Muslim, feels compelled to say he's a longtime member of the United Church of Christ. Republican Mitt Romney wrestled with public questions about his Mormon faith before he recently folded his campaign.
"I don't think this was the case 40 years ago with Mitt Romney's father," says Kowalski, speaking of 1968 presidential candidate George Romney. "I don't remember any talk of what church he belonged to, and that's the way the founders envisioned it."
'Tolerance and respect'
To prove his points, Kowalski spent the past three years amassing a bibliography of 86 historical sources, all while juggling his roles as full-time minister, husband and father of two. BlueBridge, a small publisher of spiritual books, just released his 224-page hardcover. The trade publication Publishers Weekly has lauded the book in part because he "illustrates his arguments with just the right quotations from the founders themselves."
Take these words of James Madison: "The door of the federal government is open to men of every description, whether native or adoptive, whether young or old, and without regard to poverty or wealth, or to any particular profession of religious faith."
And of John Adams, who said the framers of the Constitution never "had interviews with the gods or were in any degree under the inspiration of heaven."
Kowalski notes "from the very beginning, there were many opposed to the separation of church and state." But the country's creators clearly didn't want to mix politics and prayer. So why do many present-day Americans believe otherwise?
Kowalski starts with 1800s historians who embellished the story of the Founding Fathers sorry, boys and girls, but Washington didn't chop down a cherry tree and thus skewed the perceptions of future generations.
The minister also points to the passing of the men themselves, who retired and died as evangelicals and religious revivals swept the country with more fervent thought.
"Though they did not seek to found a Christian nation, they did aim to establish a republic of virtue, and we must never forget their conviction that civic virtue implies not only tolerance but respect for the multiplicity of opinions and outlooks that infuse this land," the minister concludes in his book. "The values and core beliefs of the founders need to be better known and more vigilantly defended if we wish the system of government they established and the liberties they bequeathed us to endure."
Kowalski refers back to Washington, whose "vision for the nation went beyond tolerance to an active embrace of spiritual variety."
The first president affirmed that in his farewell address.
"Cultivate peace and harmony with all," the minister quotes Washington as saying. "Religion and morality enjoin this conduct."
Contact Kevin O'Connor at kevin.oconnor@rutlandherald.com.