John Adams, Knowledge & The Character of Literary Men

One of the most influential Founding Fathers of the United States was John Adams, our second president and the revolutionary delegate who was instrumental in persuading Congress to adopt the United States’ Declaration of Independence in 1776.

A Unitarian Progressive Christian, Adams was well familiar with the abuses to which Christianity was subject, yet he kept an abiding faith in religion’s positive role of uniting and morally guiding the American people. This does not mean though that Adams felt government should in any way be involved in religion. Like Jefferson, Franklin, and others, Adams was well aware how such involvement could quickly corrupt the Christian ideals of charity, virtue, and selflessness.

In the following passage, taken from a letter to Virginia State senator John Taylor, John Adams talks about the dubious character of “literary men” in America and the petty vices, jealousy, and hatred that exist in universities and other learned institutions, a cutting observation that many Americans today will humorously (or lamentably) admit still rings true.

A few words more concerning the characters of literary men. What sorts of men have worked the presses in the United States for the last thirty years? In Germany, in England, in France, in Holland, the presses, even the newspapers, have been under the direction of learned men. How has it been in America? How many presses, how many newspapers, have been directed by vagabonds, fugitives from a bailiff, a pillory, or a hangman’s noose in Europe?

You know it is one of the sublimest and profoundest discoveries of the eighteenth century that knowledge is corruption; that arts, sciences, and taste have deformed the beauty and destroyed the felicity of human nature, which appears only in perfection in the savage state–the children of nature. Yet I fear not the propagation and dissemination of knowledge. The conditions of humanity will be improved and ameliorated by its expansion and diffusion in every direction. May every human being (man, woman, and child) be as well informed as possible! After all, did you ever see a rose without a briar, a convenience without an inconvenience, a good without an evil, in this mingled world? Knowledge is applied to bad purposes as well as to good ones.

There is no necessary connection between knowledge and virtue. Simple intelligence has no association with morality. What connection is there between the mechanism of a clock or watch and the feeling of moral good and evil, right or wrong? You may read the history of all the universities, academies, monasteries of the world, and see whether learning extinguishes human passions or corrects human vices. You will find in them as many parties and factions, as much jealousy and envy, hatred and malice, revenge and intrigue, as you will in any legislative assembly or executive council, the most ignorant city or village.¹

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Read the next article in our series on the Founding Fathers: James Madison on Religion & Teachers of Christianity.

Gain fresh insight into the Lord’s Prayer. Read our free online book The Lord’s Prayer for Daily Life. The prayer’s hidden teachings will enrich and inspire you. Click the following link to begin reading the Living Hour book now: The Lord’s Prayer.

1. The above passage by John Adams was edited for length and to make it easier to be read by the modern reader. [↩]

The Founding Fathers On Christianity, God, & Religion

Many of the Founding Fathers of the United States could be best described as SBNR (Spiritual But Not Religious) Progressive Christians. We at The Living Hour often look back to them for inspiration, for they were leaders who possessed a solid sense of reason that was backed by an understanding of the divine nature of creation and their place in it. As such, they strongly demonstrated all the characteristics of the truly progressive Christian.

Therefore for the next month, our SBNR Motivational series will be featuring passages from Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, John Adams, and other early Americans, on the subjects of Christianity, God, and Religion. To get the ball rolling, let’s begin with the following passage from Thomas Jefferson, taken from a letter to Moses Robinson, the governor of the Vermont Republic who helped usher Vermont to statehood.

In this passage we find Jefferson commenting on the Christian clergy, the Church, and the State, comments which still are very relevant today. Jefferson’s hope that “good sense” will prevail among orthodox Christians is unfortunately still waiting to be realized:

The Eastern States will be the last to come over, because of the dominion of the clergy, who had got a smell of union between Church and State, and began to indulge in reveries that can never be realized in the age of science. If, indeed, they could have prevailed on us to view all the advances in science as dangerous innovations, and to look back to the opinions and practices of our forefathers, instead of looking forward, for improvement, a promising groundwork would have been laid.

But I have hopes that their good sense will show them that since the mountain will not come to them, they had better go to the mountain: that they will find it in their interest to acquiesce to the liberty and science of their country, and that the Christian religion, when divested of the rags in which they have enveloped it, and brought to the original purity and simplicity of its benevolent institutor, is a religion most friendly to liberty, science, and the freest expansion of the human mind.

I sincerely wish with you, we could see our government so secured as to depend less on the character of the person in whose hands it is trusted. Bad men will sometimes get in, and with such an immense patronage, may make great progress in corrupting the public mind and principles. This is a subject with which wisdom and patriotism should be occupied.¹

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Read the next in the series: Benjamin Franklin’s Religion & Jesus of Nazareth.

Gain fresh insight into the Lord’s Prayer. Read our free online book The Lord’s Prayer for Daily Life. The prayer’s hidden teachings will enrich and inspire you. Click the following link to begin reading the Living Hour book now: The Lord’s Prayer.

1. Some very small edits were made to above passage to make the reading easier for the contemporary reader [↩]