Quick Book Report: Moral Minority
Jul 25th, 2008 by learningumbrella
I should give you all a book post about children’s books, but I’ve been a somewhat bad mommy this week, and instead of reading a lot to my kids, I’ve devoured several adult books. Sitting in my hottub and reading is my new favorite way to end a day. And lying in bed with my book is a great way to start a day. And eating lunch while reading a book. And lying on the sofa in the afternoon with a glass of iced tea and a book. Lazy days make for some great study time.
So I just chewed right through this interesting book:
Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers by Brooke Allen
It’s a well-written book, organized into little mini-biographies of six of the Founders (Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton) focusing on their religious beliefs. There are samples of their writings here that I haven’t seen anywhere else, that I found very illuminating as they showed more of their private opinions and mindset. The letters that Jefferson and Adams exchanged late in life were amazing - I wish I had a correspondence like that with long thoughtful, intelligent letters debating ideas. Or maybe that’s what a blog is like, for us modern folk.
There is also a lot of discussion of Enlightenment philosophy in this book, pointing me in a direction I need to wander down to fill in some more gaps in my reading. On the educational To Do list: Stoicism (I know, classical, not Enlightenment), Voltaire, Hume, Locke.
To see the Founders as educated men of the Enlightenment, and the foundations of America as being Enlightenment ideals, is very interesting to me. I still need to read more about the French Revolution, as the author points out again that it was the excesses of that revolution that pushed people to swing the other way, and feel that freedom and rationality were bad or simply impossible. To see history as something of a pendulum, with the excesses and horrors of the Reformation pushing people to see organized religion as bad, leading to the excesses and horrors of the French Revolution pushing people to see “Natural Philosophy” as bad, is also very interesting to me.
This really was a quick read, for a history book, and it’s very thought-provoking. Check it out!
Thanks for blogging about this book. A friend mentioned this book a while back, and I had forgotten about it. It is terribly fascinating to read the truth, from the letters of hte men themselves. Far too often, revisionist history has warped these ideas, putting them into an entirely Christian focus. Adding it to my list…
[…] Unitarian Universalist writer. It covers the same ground as Moral Minority, which I reviewed here, but in a deeper way that takes a more nuanced view of religion and faith. Many of the founding […]