Both sides of often-heated First Amendment debates about the relationship between church and state would do well to look at how America’s Founding Fathers discovered common ground with evangelicals in establishing religious liberty, said Thomas Kidd, Baylor University associate professor of history.

Kidd’s new book, “God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution,” finds how Christian evangelicals helped nudge the colonies toward revolution against Great Britain, then collaborated with revolutionary leaders such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison to ensure religious liberty as a fundamental right in the new nation.

The question of religious freedom was important enough that Baptist leader John Leland could put aside his theological differences with Jefferson, whose personal faith denied Jesus Christ’s divinity and salvation.

At the same time, Jefferson saw the important, if not crucial, role that religion could play in the new nation, curbing personal pursuit of freedom from a destructive end.

“Many of the Founding Fathers believed that freedom by itself would turn into chaos,” Kidd said.

Kidd contends that rather than creating an overtly Christian country, the “great genius” of the Founding Fathers lay in the establishment of religious liberty.

A country with no state-backed religion may have seemed a radical experiment at the time — most European countries, including England, had state-supported religions — but it resulted in a country whose citizens are highly religious today, even as the faiths they practice are diverse.

In battling over the relationship between church and state, Christian evangelicals should realize they don’t have to make the Founding Fathers all Christian in their personal faiths to justify the founders’ generally positive view of civic spirituality, Kidd writes.

Likewise, secularists should realize that while they didn’t want a government-supported religion, they didn’t want religion swept out of the public arena altogether.

“Jefferson was more generous (with evangelicals) than current secularists, while evangelicals of his day were more patient with those who didn’t believe as they did,” Kidd said.

Kidd’s book evolved from his 2007 work, “The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America.” The work led with how the Christian revival movement influenced the colonists’ later move to separation from England.

He followed that effort with “American Christians and Islam: Evangelical Culture and Muslims from the Colonial Period to the Age of Terrorism.”

Kidd, co-director of Baylor’s Program on Historical Studies of Religion, thought a look at the role religion played in the American Revolution would be timely and possibly a moderating influence on arguments about religious displays in civic spaces, tolerance of Islam and other issues.

“I was trying to write for a general audience and bring a little sobriety to the debate of religion and the Founding Fathers,” he said.

Some evangelicals have pointed to the Great Awakening, a period of religious revival that swept through the colonies in the middle of the 18th century, as planting a spiritual hunger for freedom that blossomed into the American Revolution.

Kidd points out that evangelical preachers — largely Baptist, Presbyterian and Methodist — may have planted seeds of rebellion as well since they were among the first colonists to oppose the state in the form of the state-established church.

That fissure would widen later with dissent of taxation and governmental policy.

Many of those preachers and revivalists were persecuted and punished publicly for their efforts — a fresh memory that stayed with such leaders as Jefferson, Madison and Andrew Hamilton as they grappled with the bounds and powers America’s new government should have in the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

While today’s tea party activists cite colonial anger about taxation as a philosophical touchstone, Kidd said religious colonists were incensed and radicalized by Britain’s move to install an Anglican bishop over the colonies and the pro-Catholic 1774 Quebec Acts, which some evangelicals felt were a threat to their religious liberty.

Colonial evangelicals also provided a spiritual dimension to questions of human equality and freedom — both given by God, they believed — that elevated the revolution from a mere fight over taxation and governance. It injected many with an energy and determination that helped see the cause through, Kidd said.

Yet even after winning religious liberty, Americans could prove intolerant where religion was concerned. Many evangelicals and some Founding Fathers were anti-Catholic.

Protestant rhetoric of the day often equated the pope with the Book of Revelation’s Antichrist and the equality of man expressed in the Declaration of Independence didn’t extend to slaves for many southern Christians.

“Fights over religion we’ve always had and we’ve survived,” Kidd said. “I’m afraid today we’re too polarized, but the founders offer us a middle way.”

Kidd will sign copies of his book this morning at the Baylor Bookstore after the homecoming parade.

choover@wacotrib.com

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