A Moral and Religious People

The Calvinist Republic

Adams understood the American experiment as a wager on human nature, and he was not optimistic about the odds. His insistence on constitutional checks and balances was not merely procedural but theological: if human beings were not fallen, a simpler form of government might suffice. But Adams had read his Calvin, and he knew better.

His famous letter to the Massachusetts Militia is a recognition that political institutions cannot by themselves produce the virtues they require to function. The republic depends on citizens who bring something to it from outside the political order, something that cannot be generated by the republic itself.

What the Correspondence Reveals

The Adams-Jefferson letters are one of the most revealing documents of the founding generation’s religious thought. Adams and Jefferson differed profoundly — Jefferson’s Deism was sunnier and more confident than Adams’s Calvinist skepticism — but both men recognized that the republic they had founded was betting on human beings to behave better than their nature strictly warranted.

The Seed of the Woman

Genesis 3:15 inaugurates a conflict between two ways of understanding human nature: as fallen creatures who require redemption, or as essentially good beings who require only the right institutional arrangements. Adams stood firmly on the first side.

His insistence that the republic depends on something outside itself — on a moral and religious people — is a recognition, however partial, that the seed of the woman must do work that the seed of politics cannot.

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