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Faith and the Founding Fathers

By: Adam Jortner, The Great Courses
Narrated by: Adam Jortner
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Publisher's summary

What did the Founding Fathers think about religion? And why did a group of practicing Protestants create a republic with widespread religious liberty? The 12 lectures included in this fascinating course provide multi-layered insights into the vision, philosophies, politics, and deep-seated faith of these brilliant leaders - in their own time, in their own words.

Listeners will examine the unorthodox religious journeys of men like George Washington, Ben Franklin, Thomas Paine, and John Jay, as well as the profound and passionate faiths of John Adams, Patrick Henry, and Benjamin Rush. They’ll also explore the ways in which the Founders thought about mixing religion with political power, from establishing national fast days to disestablishing state churches.

Along the way, listeners will hear about the profound changes religious freedom created in America. The Faith and the Founding Fathers is the story of how liberty and religion wrestled with each other at the birth of the republic and created the forms and traditions of modern American religion.

Through these 12 lectures, listeners will come to fully understand the philosophies of the Founding Fathers as they:

  • Investigate how religion responded to the American Revolution
  • Travel back to pre-revolutionary American religion and encounter the renegades of the Great Awakening and the tenets of Puritans and Deists
  • Learn how the American Revolution was influenced by the beliefs of everyone from John Adams to Charles Carroll
  • Discover how religious liberty became enshrined as law
  • Examine surprising effects of religious liberty that the Founding Fathers never anticipated, including the rise of new forms of Christianity and American revivalism
  • Follow the rapid expansion of African American Christianity among both free and enslaved communities

Despite how far removed the faiths of the Founding Fathers are from us in the 21st century, Dr. Jortner’s explorations of their philosophies offer illuminating insights into modern politics, religious liberty, and the overarching role of religion in human civilization.

©2019 Audible Originals, LLC (P)2019 Audible Originals, LLC.
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Our favorite moments from Faith and the Founding Fathers

Chapter 2, Lecture 1: Religion and the American Founders
  • Chapter 2, Lecture 1: Religion and the American Founders
Separation of church and state
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Chapter 8, Lecture 7: The Religion of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson
  • Chapter 8, Lecture 7: The Religion of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson
Jefferson vs. Adams
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Chapter 12, Lecture 11: Religious Challenges in the Age of the Founders
  • Chapter 12, Lecture 11: Religious Challenges in the Age of the Founders
Demonic Christmas
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  • Chapter 2, Lecture 1: Religion and the American Founders
  • Separation of church and state
  • Chapter 8, Lecture 7: The Religion of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson
  • Jefferson vs. Adams
  • Chapter 12, Lecture 11: Religious Challenges in the Age of the Founders
  • Demonic Christmas
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About the Professor

Dr. Adam Jortner is the Goodwin-Philpott Eminent Scholar of Religion in the Department of History at Auburn University. He received his BA in Religion from the College of William and Mary, and his MA and PhD in History from the University of Virginia. Dr. Jortner is the author of Blood from the Sky: A Political History of Miracles in Early America, and The Gods of Prophetstown: The Battle of Tippecanoe and the Holy War for the American Frontier, which won the James Broussard Prize from the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic. He is also the author of numerous book chapters and articles on religion and early America, and has received grants and fellowships from many organizations, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Antiquarian Society, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the Massachusetts Historical Society. Dr. Jortner is a frequent contributor to the American history podcast BackStory and a former script editor for the children’s television show Where in Time Is Carmen Sandiego?

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Highly recommended

Regardless of your political persuasion, "Faith and the Founding Fathers" is sure to be interesting, surprising and enlightening. I didn't have high hopes for this. It was just another The Great Courses book to add as I was grabbing some others. But it really exceeded my expectations.

The founding fathers had diverse opinions on religion. Many common stories turn out to be false. There's absolutely no reason to believe George Washington was kneeling in the snow, praying, at Valley Forge, for example. The views of the times were complicated and varied across different parts of what was going to become the US. Several religious groups had to struggle greatly in order to have any freedoms or respect as well - the way some were treated as quite shocking.

Our view of the relion of the founding fathers tends to be greatly oversimplified. It makes sense that the reality would be much messier - we only need to look at modern America to see how complicated different people's faiths can be, even when they say they follow the same religion.

This is the sort of history that should be taught in school. Again, I highly recommend this for everyone in the US.

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Very enlightening.

Interesting and informative. Answers a lot of questions which are the basis of debate in the US today.

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great information

really enjoyed this series. learned alot about the Founding Fathers and their religion and intent for America.

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Interesting

I've never really been interested in religion and faith but thought I would give this a shot. It still kind of went over my head but there were a lot of good tidbits in there. Recommend for anyone who is interested in religion.

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Great listen!

Really enjoyed the level headed look back at the founding fathers. Time lets us pretend now is the only time of disagreement but it’s human nature in the end.

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Of Interest Even to International Audiences

Every sentence is a tidbit that leads listeners to want even more detail, potentially requiring thousands of hours of further narrative. This is a truly balanced and arguably unbiased treatment of a subject that could easily have been warped by a scholar with a personal agenda. It is of considerable interest even to those of us in the (British) Commonwealth of Nations.

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Great book...

What a great book. Just an amazing history of not only the faith of the founders but the history surrounding the times.
I thoroughly enjoyed the reading. Great information. Actually, something like this should be in required history class for high school students.
Way more than the title implies.
Thank you.

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Excellent

A simply superb presentation of early American religions and the creation of the U.S. Constitution. Jortner is a great speaker.

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Good Info; Bizarre Conclusion

Lots of good info, but it ends by saying, essentially, “It doesn’t matter what the Founders’ faith was.” Fine, ok, but then why did you just spend five hours teaching me about it?

His argument is not unreasonable—many understand the Constitution as a living document that should reflect the will of the people alive today—but it is a disservice to the listener to present only one side of that debate without any treatment of originalism, especially when originalism dominates modern Supreme Court opinions.

It’s as if the only reason to know about the Founders is to defuse originalists in a sort of BuzzFeed parody: “Ten Ways to Respond to Your Originalist Friends. Number six will blow your mind!”

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Loved it

This is an enlightening look at faith and the founding fathers from a strictly historical perspective, a welcome non-polemical approach. The bottom line as I understand it, is that there is no clear cut evidence, let alone proof, that the founding fathers (a wide swath of people) agreed about the role of religion in government, and in fact there are huge contradictions and disputes that belie anyones argument that they know their collective intention.

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