What John Adams Really Said About "The Bloodiest Religion"

What with all of her longstanding and frequently expressed hatred of religion and, especially, Christianity, one of the great ironies of the life of Barbara Ehrenreich must be that her truly fine piece of Nellie Bly style reporting, "Nickled and Dimed" is probably most often read by Christians with the expressed intention of it informing their religious obligation and action.  Or, at least, that's been my observation.  In my memory I can recall it being the current book of two or three Christian book groups I know of and quite frequently in the bibliography or "see also" of explicitly Christian articles.  Just by the percentages of Christians, Jews, other religious people and the tiny number of atheists and agnostics, most of those who read Ehrenreich are members of those religions.

Generally, I like Ehrenreich's work and loved "Nickled and Dimed," though many of the people I knew whose life she did her best to document in all of its impossible desperation are in a far worse position than she placed herself in, without her education and intellectual resources, without her knowledge that this was a temporary research assignment.  I don't think she would disagree with that observation, then or now.

I was steered to read  this address she gave quite a while ago now.  The original was given on the occasion of, "the acceptance speech for the 1999 Freethought Heroine Award"

While there are a number of problems with the text, one that jumped out at me was her saying:

Then there was the makeover of the founding fathers, who are often portrayed, by the Christian Coalition and their ilk, as a bunch of real solid Christians who founded this nation, etc. You've all heard that. I hardly need to remind this group that that particular invasion of religion into our history is not true--the founding fathers were mostly Deists, as we know, meaning they thought there might once have been a god who set things in motion and then just walked off and retired from the scene. They were, in other words, what would be called today "godless atheists" and they founded this country. We need to remember that.

There are some specific examples--John Adams once described the entire Judeo-Christian tradition as "the bloodiest religion that ever existed." Of course there was Tom Jefferson who advised a young friend: in your philosophical thinking don't forget to open up the question of whether there is such a deity. Then there was Ethan Allen (the revolutionary hero, not the furniture store), who wrote the first anti-Christian tract ever published in America. So these are the kind of guys who founded this nation.

Well, I'll agree that the "Christian" Coalition and their ilk frequently distort history but it's also true that atheists frequently do as well, and in no case is that more obvious than in their presentation of the "founding fathers".  For example,  I'm familiar with the letter in which Adams wrote that phrase and Ehrenreich's  characterization of it is a compete distortion of what he said.  A fuller quote, which I'll give before giving the whole letter might be:

The Hebrew unity of Jehovah, the prohibition of all similitudes, appears to me the greatest wonder of antiquity. How could that nation preserve its creed among the monstrous theologies of all the other nations of the earth? Revelation, you will say, and especial Providence; and I will not contradict you, for I cannot say with Dupuis that a revelation is impossible or improbable.

Christianity, you will say, was a fresh revelation. I will not deny this. As I understand the Christian religion, it was, and is, a revelation. But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed? How has it happened that all the fine arts, architecture, painting, sculpture, statuary, music, poetry, and oratory, have been prostituted, from the creation of the world, to the sordid and detestable purposes of superstition and fraud?

Already, it can be seen that, far from rejecting Judaism and Christianity or the possibility of their being revealed religion, he said that he disagreed with Dupuis, I believe he means Charles Dupuis, author of Origine de tous les Cultes, ou la Réligion Universelle, a rather absurd 18th century debunker of the reality of Jesus.  I believe Dupuis was one of the major figures in the 18th century deism fad, which is clearly at odds with the idea of revelation.  Adams clearly says, " I cannot say with Dupuis that a revelation is impossible or improbable."  He goes on to say "As I understand the Christian religion, it was, and is, a revelation."  Hardly something you'd expect a deist to hold with, at least not in line with the quasi-atheist spin that is generally put on deism these days.


You can read more about Adams and Jefferson on the topic of religion in these letters, somewhat over-edited for my liking.  Ehrenreich might consider this passage from Adams:

Now I will avow, that I then believed, and now believe, that those general Principles of Christianity, 
are as eternal and immutable, as the Existence and Attributes of God; and that those Principles of Liberty, are as unalterable as human Nature and our terrestrial, mundane System.

And this:

Twenty times, in the course of my late Reading, have I been upon the point of breaking out, "This would be the best of all possible Worlds, if there were no Religion in it." ! ! ! But in this exclamati[on] I should have been as fanatical as Bryant or Cleverly. Without Religion this World would be Something not fit to be mentioned in polite Company, I mean Hell. So far from believing in the total and universal depravity of human Nature; I believe there is no Individual totally depraved. The most abandoned Scoundrel that ever existed, never Yet Wholly extinguished his Conscience, and while Conscience remains there is some Religion.

I don't hold much with the cult of the "founding fathers," something that is most commonly cited to bad ends but there is something really annoying about seeing them distorted to bad ends of any kind.  Here's the entire letter

TO F. A. VANDERKEMP.

Quincy, 27 December, 1816.
I do declare that I can write Greek better than you do, though I cannot say, so well as you can if you will. I can make nothing but pothooks and trammels of the frontispiece of your amiable letter of the 15th. If you had quoted your authority, I might have found it.

Jesus is benevolence personified, an example for all men. Dupuis has made no alteration in my opinions of the Christian religion, in its primitive purity and simplicity, which I have entertained for more than sixty years. It is the religion of reason, equity, and love; it is the religion of the head and of the heart.

It would be idle for me to write observations upon Dupuis. I must fill thirteen volumes. If I was twenty-five years old, and had the necessary books and leisure, I would write an answer to Dupuis; but when, or where, or how should I get it printed? Dupuis can be answered, to the honor and advantage of the Christian religion as I understand it. To this end I must study astrology as well as astronomy, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Arabic, Persian, and Sanscrit.

But to leave Dupuis to be answered or reviewed in Edinburgh or London, I must inquire into the attributes given by the ancient nations to their divinities; gods with stars and new moons in their foreheads or on their shoulders; gods with heads of dogs, horns of oxen, bulls, cows, calves, rams, sheep, or lambs; gods with the bodies of horses; gods with the tails of fishes; gods with the tails of dragons and serpents; gods with the feet of goats. The bull of Mithra; the dog of Anubis; the serpent of Esculapius!!!!

Is man the most irrational beast of the forest? Never did bullock, or sheep, or snake imagine himself a god. What, then, can all this wild theory mean? Can it be any thing but allegory founded in astrology? Your Manilius would inform you as well as Dupuis.

The Hebrew unity of Jehovah, the prohibition of all similitudes, appears to me the greatest wonder of antiquity. How could that nation preserve its creed among the monstrous theologies of all the other nations of the earth? Revelation, you will say, and especial Providence; and I will not contradict you, for I cannot say with Dupuis that a revelation is impossible or improbable.

Christianity, you will say, was a fresh revelation. I will not deny this. As I understand the Christian religion, it was, and is, a revelation. But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed? How has it happened that all the fine arts, architecture, painting, sculpture, statuary, music, poetry, and oratory, have been prostituted, from the creation of the world, to the sordid and detestable purposes of superstition and fraud?

The eighteenth century had the honor to discover that Ocellus of Lucania, Timæus of Locris, Aristotle, Tacitus, Quintilian, and Pliny, were in the right. The philosophy of Frederic, Catharine, Buffon, De la Lande, Diderot, d’Alembert, Condorcet, d’Holbach, and Dupuis, appears to me to be no more nor less than the philosophy of those ancient men of science and letters, whose speculations came principally from India, Egypt, Chaldea, and Phœnicia. A consolatory discovery, to be sure! Let it once be revealed or demonstrated that there is no future state, and my advice to every man, woman, and child would be, as our existence would be in our own power, to take opium. For, I am certain, there is nothing in this world worth living for but hope, and every hope will fail us, if the last hope, that of a future state, is extinguished.

I know how to sympathize with a wounded leg, having been laid up with one for two or three months, and I have felt the delightful attentions of a daughter. May you have the felicity to celebrate as many more lustres of Madam Vanderkemp as human nature can bear.

The Works of John Adams, vol. 10 (Letters 1811-1825, Indexes) [1854]

I don't see much in that of use to contemporary atheist polemics, not without exactly the same kind of distortion that would make it useful to an assertion of an establishment of fundamentalist "christian" religion in the hands of the "Christian" Coalition.