An Impulse of the Moment
Religion, more specifically Christianity in its many forms, has always played a large role in American life. This is extraordinary given that the Church was very much disestablished from the state with the formation of the United States; the First Amendment to the Constitution declares, “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” We might even imagine the new United States to be a secular society. Thomas Jefferson once declared, “It does me no injury or my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” Yet this was in reference to government intervention, whereas in other arenas a religious fervor was often in evidence: many of the first settlers were religious refugees, religion had a big role in the abolition movement and evangelical revivals would sweep the nation on occasion. Yet we also hear of the influence that the Enlightenment had on religious thought (or vice versa) and several of the Founding Fathers of the United States were thought to be deists: that is, having a conception of God or a Creator – often preferring words such as Providence – but less so a belief in the supernatural and miracles, cultivating a mistrust of organized religion and its authority and cleaving to reason and the rational.
The "impulse of the moment" is a musing of Henry Knox, former revolutionary general and Secretary of War, written in the summer of 1787. It consists of a page of sentences discussing his beliefs on reality in spiritual terms. How and why he came to write it we can only infer from the title as there is generally not a lot of discussion of religion in his correspondence. What is interesting about this piece is that it is reminiscent of a loose deist thought. There are no references to Christianity or organized religion, but rather how “the mind of an intelligent man is overpowered with the extent magnitude and effulgence of inanimate nature…” It continues:
Infinitely deversified indeed but every part having an esential connection with & dependance on each other, from an atom up to a world a system, an association of systems untill stretching into the immensity of creation The scale becomes too lagre [sic] to be embraced by the imagination of an inhabitant of this globe. Analogy Philosophy and Religion teach us that there is also a glorious system of intellectual beings – and although in this stage of our existence we cannot have and define the mode or connection of or spiritual with our corporeal being yet we know enough to induce us to reverence and adore the infinite power by whom we live more and have our being…
This document is testament to the diversity of religious belief of the times and also the role reason and the Enlightenment was bringing to bear on religious thought. Several of the founding fathers were known to be deists, amongst them Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison; even George Washington is or was suspected of holding these beliefs. Henry Knox’s ruminations illustrate this strand of religious/rational thought with its references to “intellectual beings”, and scientific references to atoms and “glorious systems”.
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