Both reason and religion have been acknowledged by scholars to have had a profound impact

on the foundation and formation of the American regime. But the significance, pervasiveness,

and depth of that impact have also been disputed. While many have approached the American

founding period with an interest in the influence of Enlightenment reason or Biblical religion,

they have often assumed such influences to be exclusive, irreconcilable, or contradictory. Few

scholarly works have sought to study the mutual influence of reason and religion as intertwined

strands shaping the American historical and political experience at its founding. The purpose of

the chapters in this volume, authored by a distinguished group of scholars in political science,

intellectual history, literature, and philosophy, is to examine how this mutual influence was

made manifest in the American Founding--especially in the writings, speeches, and thought of

critical figures (Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson,

James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Charles Carroll), and in later works by key interpreters of

the American Founding (Alexis de Tocqueville and Abraham Lincoln).



Taken as a whole, then, this volume does not attempt to explain away the potential opposition

between religion and reason in the American mind of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- centuries, but instead argues that there is a uniquely American perspective and political thought

that emerges from this tension. The chapters gathered here, individually and collectively, seek

to illuminate the animating affect of this tension on the political rhetoric, thought, and history

of the early American period. By taking seriously and exploring the mutual influence of these

two themes in creative tension, rather than seeing them as diametrically opposed or as mutually

exclusive, this volume thus reveals how the pervasiveness and resonance of Biblical narratives

and religion supported and infused Enlightened political discourse and action at the Founding,

thereby articulating the complementarity of reason and religion during this critical period.