Thomas Jefferson, who put ‘Nature's God’ into the Declaration of Independence, once wrote to John Adams, who approved the phrase, about a book whose author ‘selects therefore all the facts, and adopts all the falsehoods which favor his theory, and very gravely retails such absurdities as zeal for a theory alone could swallow. He was a man of much classical … reading, and has rendered his book not unentertaining’ (11 June 1812). The same might be said of Matthew Stewart's Nature's God. It is ‘not unentertaining’ – in fact, it is written in lively prose, and its author, a ‘man of much classical reading’, gives readers an interesting tour of Epicurean and Enlightenment deist philosophy. Moreover, it takes a novel approach to a perennially important topic, namely, the meaning and place of the religious principles of the Declaration in the American constitutional order. Nevertheless, the book's central thesis -- that ‘Nature's God’ is, in actuality, Epicurus' and Spinoza's pantheistic god, which, in turn, is no god at all – would have astonished Jefferson and Adams (let alone the Declaration's other fifty-four signatories), and caused them to dismiss its theory as, to say the least, zealous (p. 3). For amidst the book's entertaining features is this fatal flaw: there is no compelling evidence that the Declaration's authors believed such a thing themselves, or meant anyone else to believe it.

Stewart is understandably indignant about polemical books that have tried to make the United States out to be an intentionally ‘Christian nation’ at its founding. The first of many troubles is that he directs his indignation (and that of his readers) toward a small group of popularising writers and straw men, and mis-characterises the substantial body of scholarship (some of it by academics with no religious faith) which treats with nuance the religious dimension of the American Enlightenment, but which is airily and falsely waved away as ‘new Christian nationalism’ (p. 445). Rather than the popularisers' ‘Christian’ America, or the scholars' religiously-informed nation, Stewart prefers an America founded (the Declaration is its first Organic Law), not on Christianity, or even theism (as Chesterton once observed), but on atheism. Stewart also prefers an America whose founding political theology was a mere trickle off the mainstream, a theology held by Ethan Allen, the ‘infidel’ hero of Ticonderoga, and Thomas Young, the rumoured ghostwriter of Allen's Reason, the only oracle of man (which barely sold two hundred copies). Though theirs is but ‘a small story in the scheme,’ Stewart can still ‘imagine that it holds the key to the only question about the American Revolution that really matters’ (p. 2), which, presumably, is: who is ‘Nature's God’? But the real key was turned by John Locke, ‘the single greatest intellectual influence on America's revolutionaries’, who anticipated the pantheism-atheism of Allen and Young, which he shared with his contemporary Spinoza (p. 141). Locke ‘fully embraces the hedonism of Epicurus, Hobbes, and Spinoza’ in his Essay concerning human understanding (p. 278). So ‘Nature's God’ of the Declaration is ‘something closer to “Nature’’’ and ‘refers to nothing we commonly mean by the term “God’’’ (p. 7). In fact, ‘Nature's God’ is no creator (despite the clear language of the next sentence in the Declaration), and, incidentally, no endower of rights. Further, the deconstructed Declaration ‘really stands for an emancipation of the political order from God’ (p. 7). Granted, Locke was interpreted as a theist (and even a latitudinarian Christian) in the Revolutionary period, but, somehow, ‘only the radical interpretation mattered’ (p. 241). Stewart came to his own radical interpretation not, evidently, through an attentive reading of the text and logic of the Declaration, or of the relevant historical record, but initially through a kind of intuition. He ‘sensed’ the ‘presence of Spinoza’, as a ‘philosophical specter’ hovering (one supposes that is what spectres do) around the philosophical ghost of John Locke, who was himself ‘lurking’ nearby (p. 3). And while James Madison, Father of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, praised America's founders for not suffering ‘a blind veneration for antiquity, for custom, or for names, to overrule the suggestions of their own good sense … and the lessons of their own experience’ (Federalist 14, 1787), Stewart prefers an America founded by philosophers, on arcane philosophical reasoning. ‘Ever since Plato conceived of his republic’, he writes, ‘people have speculated about what might happen if philosophers should rule the world. We no longer need to wonder’ (p. 7). Or do we?

The inconvenient fact is that America's revolutionaries thought Plato's political philosophy was hare-brained. After reading his Republic and Laws, Adams complained to Jefferson: ‘My disappointment was very great, my Astonishment was greater, and my disgust was shocking’ (16 July 1814). (Jefferson, Adams, Benjamin Franklin, R. R. Livingston and Roger Sherman – theists all, including the first three ‘heretics’ – made up the Declaration's drafting committee.) Jefferson replied in kind, and later castigated not only Plato, but his follower Epicurus, who was equally ‘diffuse, vapid, and rhetorical’ (31 October 1819). Madison, after invoking ‘the transcendent law of nature and of nature's God’ in his Federalist essays, insisted that ‘the philosophical race of kings wished for by Plato’ was not to be expected – not in Athens, and certainly not in America (Federalist 43, 49, 1787, emphasis added). American revolutionaries were always, in the words of one of them, tempering their theories to ‘the fixed genius of the people of America’. Jefferson himself insisted that his first draft of the Declaration was meant to express the ‘common sense’ of the grounds for independence, ‘the harmonizing sentiments of the day’, and that ‘all American Whigs thought alike’ (5 May 1825). By contrast, Stewart prefers a decidedly uncommon reading of two words in the Declaration, which he assumes are the most important and dispositive words in the history of the regime.

Which brings us to the book's principal flaw of a-historicism; a flaw that, unfortunately, taints all of its conclusions. To begin, the non-spectral Locke, though his epistemological Essay was read by American founding elites, exerted political influence through his Two treatises of civil government, especially the Second Treatise's arguments for resistance to tyrannical rule (which he borrowed from Protestant resistance tracts of the sixteenth century) and government by consent, and his Letter Concerning toleration (in which he denied toleration to atheists). Besides, historians and political theorists have long concluded that it is naïve to speak of ‘single most important intellectual influences’ on America's eclectic founders. Furthermore, questions that beg to be asked are never raised, along with evidence that would undermine the book's thesis. For example, why focus on ‘Nature's God’ when there are three other references to the deity in the Declaration, including references that the Congress (the true author of the Declaration) intentionally added to the original working draft? What kind of god do those references – to ‘the Supreme Judge of the World’ and ‘the protection of Divine Providence’, especially – suggest? (The first, incidentally, was used verbatim by Jonathan Edwards before it appeared in the Declaration; the second was the favourite name of God used by the Revd John Witherspoon, an orthodox clergyman who signed the Declaration, and may have suggested it.) Additionally, when the record is consulted, quotations are often abridged (sometimes misleadingly so), and contrary evidence suppressed. For example, though John Adams is rightly quoted as an example of a ‘heterodox’ Revolutionary (p. 61), he railed against atheism and its political effects to Jefferson, and castigated the French revolutionaries, ‘indubitable atheists’, and ‘their philosophy’, for destroying liberty in France. They destroyed it because their ‘pure, unadulterated atheism’ (Adams evidently wanted Jefferson to get the point) had made liberty ‘a word without meaning’ (2 March 1816). For his part, Jefferson, who was initially warm to the anti-clerical French Revolution, stressed, in the only book that he ever published, that the ‘only firm basis’ for rights is ‘a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God’ (Notes on the State of Virginia, 1785). Everyone involved in declaring independence thought so (even the least Christian of them -- not only Jefferson and Adams, but Franklin too), and no one thought that atheism could serve as a basis for America's new democratic society.

They could have been wrong about that, of course. But the record simply cannot be squared with Stewart's thesis. Nature's God is an entertaining, often informative, but maddeningly speculative exercise in the history of ideas. Its principal contribution is to introduce readers to the peripheral Revolutionary actor and thinker Thomas Young, and with him, to the radical philosophical and religious element of the American Enlightenment. It is in the attempt to move Young (and with him Spinoza and Epicurus) to the centre of American political thought that the book fails to convince. That, ‘in the name of the great Jehovah and the Continental Congress’ (as Ethan Allen might have said), is too much to swallow.