Pres. John Adams of Quincy Believed in Real Diversity

Pres. John Adams of Quincy Believed in Real Diversity

January 2002

MassNews may start a custom of reminding all of us every year that John Adams of Quincy personified the real Colonial patriot who founded this unequaled country and gave it great diversity and tolerance.

John Adams wrote a letter to Benjamin Rush in 1810, ten years after his Presidency, “Ask me not, then, whether I am a Catholic or Protestant, Calvinist or Arminian. As far as they are Christians, I wish to be a fellow-disciple with them all.”

(It is sad that very few Christians today would understand what an Arminian is.)

As for Jews, he wrote in a letter in 1809, “If I were an atheist, and believed in blind eternal fate, I should still believe that fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing the nations. If I were an atheist of the other sect, who believe or pretend to believe that all is ordered by chance, I should believe that chance had ordered the Jews to preserve and propagate to all mankind the doctrine of a supreme, intelligent, wise, almighty sovereign of the universe, which I believe to be the great essential principle of all morality, and consequently all civilization.”

But his tolerance did not mean he was not proud to be a Christian.

There is much talk that John Adams was an atheist or a humanist, but that is far from true.

Adams wrote in 1798 to the Grand Jurors in Greenfield about what was unfolding in France at that time, where a belief in humanism was dominant. Their revolution was a copy of ours except that they had removed God from their beliefs. Their revolution was bloody and cruel. It was to fail with Napoleon becoming dictator. With great foresight, Adams cautioned the citizens that we should not undertake the new theory of humanism that could make things much worse. He wrote:

“If a new order of things has commenced, it behooves us to be cautious, that it may not be for the worse. If the abuse of Christianity can be annihilated or diminished, and a more equitable enjoyment of the right of conscience introduced, it will be well, but this will not be accomplished by the abolition of Christianity and the introduction of Grecian mythology, or the worship of modern heroes or heroines, by erecting statues of idolatry to reason or virtue, to beauty or to taste. It is a serious problem to resolve, whether all the abuses of Christianity, even in the darkest ages, when the Pope deposed princes and laid nations under his interdict, were ever so bloody and cruel, ever bore down the independence of the human mind with such terror and intolerance, or taught doctrines which required such implicit credulity to believe, as the present reign of pretended philosophy in France.”