AMERICAN MASONS OF THE FOUNDING ERA WERE ECLECTIC IN PRACTICE rather than singly dogmatic. Their obligation, fixed in Anderson’s Constitutions of 17231, bound them to the moral law and to “that Religion in which all Men agree,” while “leaving their particular Opinions to themselves,” so that the lodge could be a center of union among men who would otherwise have remained at a distance. What they drew on was a composite moral culture already abroad in the eighteenth-century: the cardinal virtues and civic friendship of Hellenic and Roman moralism, a Stoic-like demand of self-command, the architectural and concordist habits of the Renaissance2 as these had been absorbed into English speculative Masonry, Enlightenment moral thought3, and a working multi-faith pluralism under a theistic minimum. Freemasonry carried that composite into the founding era as a moral and associative discipline in the military lodges, in the civic elite, and in public rite; and not as the author of the Constitution or the aqueduct of classical republicanism, which came by the college, the law, and the dissenting argument for conscience. The exhibit was public4. On 18 September 1793 George Washington, a Mason and a churchman, took part in the Masonic cornerstone ritual for the Capitol, and a nation already committed by Article VI to no religious test was symbolically set, in the sight of the city, on moral foundations rather than on a sect.
Now, a republic may be slandered in two directions, and the American republic has suffered both. One hand makes Freemasonry the hidden author of the laws, the wars, and the declines. The other, wishing to save the country for a single altar, treats the lodge as an embarrassment to be written out, until the public memory retains a chapel and a constitution and nothing that stood between them. The second erasure is the quieter, and in our day the more successful. It is the heir of the Anti-Masonic agitation, of the panic over hidden orders, and of a later civic piety that can say “Judeo-Christian” only after the room in which Christian, Jew, and deist had already sat together has been locked. Against that habit the record is plain. Speculative Freemasonry was not the engine of the founding5. It was integral to the pluralist settlement on which the engine depended, and the men who denied the integral part were engaged in politics, not in history.
The manner of telling the American beginning as a conspiracy conducted by apron and compass are refusals of the record. Between them lies a plainer and a harder truth. Speculative Freemasonry, as it stood in the English and American lodges of the eighteenth century, gave to men of differing confessions a working room in which they governed themselves under a theistic minimum and a rule of formal equality. That practice corroborated a republican order. It did not generate one. The theory of the order came from the mixed constitution of antiquity, from the natural-rights argument of the dissenting Enlightenment, and from a Christian distinction, older than any lodge, between the care of the soul and the care of the commonwealth.
The sentence that agitators fail to understand about this history and could not absorb was already fifty years old when the colonies broke with the Crown. Anderson’s Constitutions of 1723, in the charge Concerning God and Religion, bound the Mason to the moral law, shut the door on the atheist, antinomian and the libertine, and then refused the old rule by which a craftsman took the religion of whatever country he entered.
“A Mason is oblig’d, by his Tenure, to obey the moral Law; and if he rightly understands the Art, he will never be a stupid Atheist, nor an irreligious Libertine. But though in ancient Times Masons were charg’d in every Country to be of the Religion of that Country or Nation, whatever it was, yet ’tis now thought more expedient only to oblige them to that Religion in which all Men agree, leaving their particular Opinions to themselves; that is, to be good Men and true, or Men of Honour and Honesty, by whatever Denominations or Persuasions they may be distinguish’d; whereby Masonry becomes the Center of Union, and the Means of conciliating true Friendship among Persons that must have remain’d at a perpetual Distance.”
Here is a jurisdictional rule, not any secret political science or knowledge, and it is not a claim to have invented republicanism. It is a working constitution of fellowship, older than the Declaration, enforced nightly, and larger than any parish. Particular opinions are left at the door, not because they are judged indifferent before God, but because the lodge declined to be a church. Friendship across a distance that churches had kept perpetual: that was the art, so far as politics is concerned.
That rule was eclectic in the honest sense of the word. It drew the moral law from the common theism of the age, the discipline of the passions from the Stoic and the Christian moralists together, the language of the Great Architect from a century that had learned to speak of nature’s God without asking the speaker for his creed, and the practice of relief from the charity all the churches praised and few of them managed across a fence.
In 1783 certain German lodges formed the Eclectic Union at Frankfurt. The German Eclectic Union of 1783 reformed the lodge by stripping away high-grade invention and loosened the Christian test, returning the craft toward the three degrees and the moral law. American Masonry of the founding years was not that body, but the Premier Grand Lodge’s system and, increasingly, the Antient system, worked through William Preston’s Illustrations of Masonry and, after 1797, and Thomas Smith Webb’s Freemason’s Monitor. Its public teaching was the same center of union in a plainer key: geometry, brotherhood, the obligation, the improvement of the man, charity, and the Great Architect as a name for the God of nature. Outside of this, esoteric currents existed in corners of the Continental craft but are not the political philosophy of Philadelphia. Likewise, the Stoic held the world to be the city of Zeus, shot through with reason. The Gnostic holds the world a prison. These are not one lineage, and the lodge of 1776 transmitted neither as a system. No serious account needs a Gnostic mystery to make this matter. The mystery-mongers and the heresy-hunters have always needed it more than the craft did. A school of moral self-command, open to more than one denomination and shut to the man who will not be governed by the moral law, is already a political fact in a country of sects.
The fact had names. Washington was of the craft, and Franklin, Provincial Grand Master in Pennsylvania; and Hancock, Revere, Marshall, and a host of Continental officers, whose military lodges knit an army that chaplains of one church could not have knit. Jefferson was not a Mason, nor Madison, nor Adams, nor Hamilton, and anyone who loves the record will say so without flinching, because the argument does not require them to have been. The Federalist papers argue from Montesquieu and the confederacies, not from the ritual. Polybius had already described a mixed state in which the powers check one another. Cicero had defined a people as a multitude associated by law and common use, not a herd. Harrington had asked for an empire of laws. Those lineages stand. They are not diminished by the further truth that a great part of the officer class and of the civic elite had rehearsed, under apron and rule, the very habits a mixed republic demands: speech under order, equality of obligation laid over inequality of rank, secrecy of the trivial and publicity of the charitable, and a refusal to make sect the condition of trust. Lodges were not the only such school. They were the school that crossed the fences the others kept.
That experience met a theory which did not need the apron. Polybius, in the sixth book of the Histories, had described Rome as a commonwealth in which the consular, the senatorial, and the popular powers checked one another, so that none could run to its proper corruption. Cicero, in De Re Publica, defined the republic as the affair of a people, and a people as no mere multitude, but a multitude associated by agreement in law and by community of interest. Harrington, in Oceana, asked for an empire of laws and not of men. Montesquieu, in the eleventh book of The Spirit of the Laws, found liberty in the separation of the judicial power from the legislative and the executive, and warned that virtue in a republic is a severe thing, the preference of the public to oneself. These are the stones of the American mixed government. The lodge echoed them in miniature with a written constitution of the room, officers elected or installed under rule, speech permitted and passion checked, equality of glove and apron laid over inequality of fortune.
The Christian argument for a free conscience ran beside this practice and was not its rival. Madison, who never entered a lodge, wrote in the Memorial and Remonstrance of 1785 that religion, “the duty which we owe to our Creator and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence,” and that this duty is “precedent, both in order of time and in degree of obligation, to the claims of Civil Society.” A man is a subject of the Governor of the Universe before he is a citizen, and he enters the commonwealth with that allegiance reserved.
“We maintain therefore that in matters of Religion, no mans right is abridged by the institution of Civil Society and that Religion is wholly exempt from its cognizance.”
He claims for himself the religion he holds to be of divine origin and therefore cannot deny an equal freedom to minds not yet convinced. Locke had said the same in 1689. Saving religion is an inward persuasion, so that the care of souls is not committed to him. The business of civil government must be distinguished from the business of religion, for the magistrate’s power is outward force, and “true and saving religion consists in the inward persuasion of the mind, without which nothing can be acceptable to God.” Coercion can make a man kneel. It cannot make him believe, and a worship wrested from him is an offense against the God in whose name it is imposed. Behind Locke stands the older Christian division of the two regiments: Augustine’s earthly peace, which is not the City of God, and Luther’s temporal sword, which restrains the wicked and does not confer grace. Roger Williams and the Baptists had already drawn the American consequence, that the garden of the church is not the wilderness of the magistrate. A Christian may hold that there is no salvation outside the covenant he confesses and still deny the assembly any power to tax a man for a teacher he does not believe. That denial is not a fall from Christianity into the lodge. It is one reading of Christianity, contested by another, and victorious in Virginia by pamphlet and election rather than by ritual.
The Virginia Statute begins from the theology rather than from the absence of one: Almighty God created the mind free, and the Author of the religion, Lord of body and mind, chose not to propagate it by coercions. These are Christian and philosophical grounds. The lodge did not compose them. It made their social consequence ordinary, at a time when ordinary life was still arranged by parish and test. A man who had sat with a Quaker and a deist under one master found Madison’s sentence less like a speculation and more like a description of a room he knew.
Jefferson drew the statute that followed. “Almighty God hath created the mind free,” the Virginia act begins, and the attempts to influence it by punishments, burdens, or civil incapacitations “tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the Holy author of our religion, who being Lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either.” Civil rights, the act concludes, have no dependence on religious opinions, any more than opinions in physics or geometry. The preamble is theological. It argues from the method of Christ, not from the absence of Christ. Deism could use the statute. So could a Baptist who wanted no Presbyterian establishment. The coalition is the fact, and it is wider than the craft.
Washington spoke the public form of it at Newport on 18 August 1790, to the Hebrew congregation, and he would not call the thing toleration. “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens.” Three years later, on 18 September 1793, the same man stood in the clothing of the craft and laid the cornerstone of the Capitol, the lodges of Maryland and Alexandria conducting the rite. Anti-Masonic writers have ever since asked the country to blush at that hour, as if a Christian magistrate soiled his office by using a moral order older than the Constitution to mark a house of law. The blush is the doctrine. He was a churchman and a Mason, and he saw no war between the vine and fig-tree he promised Judah and the square by which he set the stone. Article VI had already forbidden a religious test for federal office. The rite did not invent the clause. It showed, in the sight of the city, what a testless republic looked like when it consented to be seen.
The settlement had edges, and an honest defense names them. It was first a peace among Protestants, with deists in the higher company and Jews received, at Newport and in a few other places, under a government that asked civic demeanour rather than conversion. Catholics still met disabilities in several states. Pennsylvania in 1776 could require of a legislator an acknowledgement of God and of rewards and punishments to come. Massachusetts in 1780 could call public worship of the Supreme Being a right and a duty, and provide for Protestant teachers. The First Amendment bound Congress. None of this cancels the center of union. It locates it. A pluralist beginning is not a modern cosmopolitan completion, and it does not become a fiction because it was incomplete. The Anti-Masonic complaint was never that the pluralism had not gone far enough. The complaint was that it had gone at all.
That complaint has a history, and the history is the erasure. Clement XII in 1738 and Leo XIII in Humanum genus of 1884 condemned the craft for oaths of secrecy and for gathering men of every sect under a natural religion, Leo naming the doctrine that human reason ought in all things to be mistress and judging religious equality before the law to be indifferentism on the road to atheism. The judgment is a theological one. It is entitled to be answered, and the answer is jurisdiction: equal standing in the lodge and in the commonwealth is not a declaration that every altar is equally true. Madison denied the magistrate the power to decide the question of altars. He did not deny that there was a question. American anti-Masonry rarely stayed at that altitude. In 1798 Jedidiah Morse and Timothy Dwights6 fitted the Bavarian Illuminati scare to New England pulpits and made of a shattered European order a key to American lodges. In 1826 William Morgan disappeared after threatening an exposure, and a death never proved in a court became the passion of a movement. By 1828 the Anti-Masonic Party, the first third party in the republic, was nominating candidates on the principle that a private obligation was incompatible with public trust. John Quincy Adams lent his old age to the letters against the craft. The literature that followed credited Masonry with the Revolution’s excesses, with secularism, with every statute the revival disliked, and later with a command of events no fraternity has ever possessed.
The charge fails on the membership alone. The lodges held monarchists and republicans, Federalists and Jeffersonians, slaveholders and men who came to call slavery theft. They did not write the slave code, the three-fifths clause, or the commercial compromises. Colonial economy and English inheritance wrote those, and men of every pew signed them. To lay the early republic’s sins on the apron is to spare the orders the accusers preferred. Nor did the craft own the liberal developments it was said to have smuggled. Non-establishment had Baptist and Lockean parents. The mixed constitution had Roman and Harringtonian ones. What the lodge owned was the habit without which those doctrines remain papers: the habit of trusting a man of another pew with a share in rule, under a moral law neither of you drafted at the door. When that habit is redescribed as conspiracy, the citizen loses the difference between a private association and a plot, and he will soon be unable to tell a club from a cabal. Conspiracism is the tax a people pays for refusing mixed causes.
The later revision completes the tax in a softer coin. Eighteenth-century public speech teaches of Providence, Creator, Nature’s God, the moral law, and the Supreme Being. It does not say “Judeo-Christian” are the foundations, because the foundations are eclectic and pluralist. That compound is a usage of the twentieth century, useful as a description of shared ethical stock, false as an inventory of 1776. Used as an inventory, it leaves no chair for the lodge, little for the deist, and none for the argument that pluralism among Christians was itself a conquest, won against establishments and tests. Classical theology, as Aquinas, Augustine, and the Stoics taught it, held a rational moral order, universal human dignity, virtue as the basis of freedom, and the common good above faction. That worldview shaped the founders’ belief that citizens must be virtuous, that liberty requires self-restraint, that politics must reflect moral order, and that pluralism can rest on shared reason. The Republic is not a bare legal frame of separated powers and elections. It is a mixed system built to prevent arbitrary power through citizen virtue. Strip out the eclectic transmission of that idea and the society is hollow, open to revisionist simplifications, whether a purely “Judeo-Christian” origin or a post-colonial dismissal. Citizens then do not meet the Republic as their own inheritance.
Washington’s Farewell Address still stands in the way of both simplifications. “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and morality are indispensable supports.” He does not name a sect as the support. He refuses the man who would hold morality up without religion, and he equally refuses, by the whole of his public Masonry, the man who would make one communion the civil test. The indispensable thing is the support, not the monopoly.
Washington, in the Farewell Address, set the moral requirement where the republican tradition had always set it. “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and morality are indispensable supports.” He did not say that a sect was the support. He said that the supports were indispensable, and he warned against the supposition that morality could be maintained without religion. The sentence binds the deist and the churchman alike, and it binds them to something the lodge also said in plainer language: that a man who will not govern himself cannot be trusted with a share in governing the state. Classical theism and Masonic moralism are not one school. Aquinas holds a rational order and a common good, yet does not hold that pluralism of worship is a natural good. The Stoic holds a share in universal reason with no distinction of blood; yet does not hold the sacramental economy. What they could share, and what the early republic in its better hours required, was narrower and enough: that men are moral agents, that freedom without self-command is a name for license, that arbitrary power is the enemy, and that elites must be checked by institutions because virtue fails. Where modern secularism keeps only the institutions and mocks the agent, and where a revived confessional politics keeps only the agent of one communion and mocks the jurisdiction of conscience, both have left the settlement. Neither can be cured by pretending the settlement was a chapel, or a conspiracy, or a single ancient wisdom poured through a single door.
This history took sacrifice, and was real, not a pamphlet. It was paid for, and the payment is the part modern political factions decline to carry, because a cost that has already been met cannot be spent again at a rally. Men went out in winter without pay and came home to debts the Congress would not honor. Officers who might have taken a crown and were asked for one in a bad hour at Newburgh, went back to their farms. Churches split, and ministers lost their pulpits for refusing a king or for refusing a mob. The Baptist who wanted no teacher imposed on him, and the Anglican who watched his establishment fall, each gave up a protection. Friendship across a denominational fence cost the simpler warmth of a single pew. None of this was comfortable, and none of it was the property of a later party. A republican beginning is a sacrifice of certain kinds of power, certainly the power of one confession to tax the others, the power of a magistrate to be the conscience of his neighbor, the power of a favorite class to call itself the state; and sacrifice resented is the ordinary fuel of the movements that follow.
What the modern-right pathology does with this is to turn the payment into a relic, and recruit the dead. In this view and the emerging Christian Nationalism, the winter at Valley Forge becomes a proof that the country was a chapel, and the chapel a proof that dissenters, deists, and the lodge were intruders on a faith the soldiers are no longer present to describe. The depth of the history is missed7 and rolled into the factional play-scheme. Sacrifice, once moralized in that way, no longer binds the living to self-command. It binds them to a grievance. The revolution is remembered as an inheritance to be guarded from strangers, not as a discipline that fell as hard on its own heirs as on the Crown. Anti-Masonry was one such guarding. A civic piety that can tell the origin only after the center of union has been locked is another. Both spend the dead against the living and call the spending gratitude.
What the modern-left pathology does is to refuse the payment altogether, or to count only the payments that condemn the payers. The republican revolutions become a crime scene whose rhetoric of liberty is evidence of hypocrisy and nothing else. Slavery, which was real, which was defended by men who signed the best sentences of the age, which law and compromise protected, is made the only fact, until the sentences are not permitted to judge the institution they failed to end. On that telling, no one sacrificed anything that a decent heir is obliged to keep. There was only domination, discovered late by prosecutors. The unpaid regiment, the test abolished, the conscience reserved against the assembly, the mixed constitution raised against arbitrary power: these drop out, or survive as costume. A people taught that its beginning was only a pathology will not defend the beginning when a new arbitrary power arrives wearing the language of repair. It will suspect every inheritance, and suspicion of that kind is not virtue. It is the absence of anything costly enough to be loyal to.
Slavery stands in the record and is not available for either use. Washington held people in bondage and freed them in his will, late. Jefferson wrote that all men are created equal and did not live the sentence. The three-fifths clause was a bargain with a crime. Nothing in the Masonic obligation, and nothing in the natural-rights argument, canceled the colonial economy those men inherited and many of them prolonged. To say otherwise is the right-hand lie. The left-hand lie is the claim that the prolongation used up the principle. It did not. A doctrine of anti-domination is not exhausted by the hypocrites who hold it. It remains a weapon in other hands, and it was so used: by petitioners the founders would not receive, by black Masons who took the lodge’s equality without the lodge’s permission, by abolitionists who quoted the Declaration against the Constitution’s bargain, by soldiers in a second and harder war who made the union pay what the first settlement had deferred. The philosophy arms the challenge to the injustice it was made to live beside. That is not absolution. It is the reason the words were worth the paper.
The republican tradition cannot be limited to the quarrel over who may claim it. Classical mixed government, the dissenting argument for soul liberty, the natural-rights page, the lodge as a center of union: these were attempts, paid for in particular lives, to keep arbitrary power from calling itself divine or popular or commercial and so escaping judgment. They fail when citizens will not be governed by the moral law they impose on magistrates. They do not fail because a later faction has found a use for the failure. The Revolution is larger than the Anti-Masonic scare and larger than the indictment that can see only the slave quarter. It is also smaller than the golden age either side sometimes needs. Between those sizes is the thing that was actually bought, which was a law above the man, a conscience the assembly may not fine, a room in which distance of opinion is not yet enmity, and the purchase was sacrifice. Whoever tells it only as a pathology of the right or of the left is spending a capital he did not earn, and he should not be surprised when the republic, so told, no longer knows what it would be costly to keep.
Also, a people told that the founding was a single ecclesiastical inheritance will look for priests when it needs citizens. A people told that it was a Masonic machine will look for passwords when it needs laws. The documents and the history support neither search. They support a mixed origin, in which classical republicanism, dissenting Protestantism, natural-rights philosophy, and an eclectic Masonic practice of union across denominational distance all bore weight, and in which the practice was slandered precisely because it worked. The Anti-Masonic tradition, from the pulpit scare of 1798 through the party of 1828 and on into the conspiratorial book, has asked the country to be ashamed of the center of union. The country has no cause for the shame. Persons who must have remained at a perpetual distance were brought into one obligation, under the moral law, with their opinions left to themselves; and a republic that forbade religious tests for its offices was acting in the spirit of a rule its leading magistrate already knew by heart.
On 18 September 1793, George Washington, a Mason who was also a churchman set a stone. The stone holds because of clauses he did not write and arguments he did not invent, and also because men of his craft had already made it ordinary that distance of opinion need not be perpetual enmity. The engine of the republican ideal was the long argument about law, conscience, and the mixed constitution, and the record of it is still open to any citizen.
FOOTNOTES
- Anderson’s charge of 1723 already obliges the Mason only to “that Religion in which all Men agree, leaving their particular Opinions to themselves,” and makes the lodge a “Center of Union” among men who would otherwise have remained at a distance. American working Masonry, Modern and Antient, kept that rule. Anglicans, Presbyterians, deists, and in some rooms Jews could sit under one obligation. That is multi-faith pluralism in the limited eighteenth-century sense: a theistic minimum, not a curriculum of world religions. ↩︎
- The Vitruvian and architectural symbolism, the taste for a primal wisdom older than the sects, and the habit of concord among lettered men are Renaissance inheritances, mostly already digested in English speculative Masonry before they reached America. ↩︎
- Preston’s Illustrations and Webb’s Monitor of 1797 teach improvability, charity, restraint of the passions, and nature’s God in the ideas of the moralists. Lodges were schools of that manners-and-virtue culture. ↩︎
- Washington, in Masonic clothing, laid the Capitol cornerstone in a rite conducted by the Grand Lodge of Maryland with Alexandria Lodge participating. The plate and the prayers name the Grand Architect and a moral foundation, but not any sect. As a public exhibit that the federal city could be marked by a non-sectarian moral order, and that the first president saw no war between that order and his office, the rite is good evidence. The Constitution had been written six years earlier, by a convention the craft did not direct, but controbuted to. ↩︎
- Freemasonry carried a composite moral and fraternal practice into the officer class, the civic elite, and the public ritual of the 1790s. It did not carry the political theory. Washington, Franklin, Hancock, Revere, and Marshall were Masons. Jefferson, Madison, Adams, and Hamilton were not. The Federalist argues from Montesquieu, the colonial charters, and the Greek confederacies, not from the lodge. Classical republicanism arrived by its own road. The craft carried the moral and associative half of that culture and corroborated the political half. ↩︎
- Timothy Dwight IV (1752-1817) was a Congregationalist minister, educator, and poet who served as the eighth president of Yale College. A grandson of Jonathan Edwards, he was influential in the Second Great Awakening and helped shape American religious and literary life through his sermons, hymns, and writings. The Second Great Awakening was a wave of Protestant revivalism in the United States from the 1790s through the 1840s, marked by emotional preaching, mass revival meetings, and a focus on personal conversion. It reshaped American religion by fueling the growth of Methodist and Baptist churches, while inspiring major social reform movements such as abolitionism, temperance, and women’s rights. ↩︎
- Read Comparative Civic Humanism: Seven Regional Currents and Lineages. ↩︎
