Politics

America's Founders Blended Liberalism and Religion

If the fusionist account of history is correct, the anti-fusionists are engaged in a far more radical project than most of them are willing to admit.

Stephanie Slade | From the July 2026 issue

Share on FacebookShare on XShare on RedditShare by emailPrint friendly versionCopy page URL Add Reason to Google

Media Contact & Reprint Requests

(Illustration: Joanna Andreason; Source images: iStock)

In a special America 250 issue, Reason takes a look back at our country's founding people and ideas. Read more here.

In "Why I Am Not a Conservative," the economist F.A. Hayek averred that "what in Europe was called 'liberalism' was here the common tradition on which the American polity had been built." He was neither the first nor the last to see America primarily as a nation rooted in individual liberty.

Yet to think the United States is purely a liberal country is to take a truth too far. The Founders drew on a panoply of sources, from classical philosophy to biblical theology, from the natural and common law traditions to the ideas of the Enlightenment. They took from each the insights that seemed best-suited to their project, and in doing so they created something at once revolutionary—a novus ordo seclorum—and rooted in the wisdom of the past.

'All Americans Are…Liberals of One Sort 
or Another'

To safeguard their freedom, the Founders divided power among the various branches and levels of government while establishing that core rights could not easily be put to the vote. Americans ever since have taken pride in having overthrown a despotic king and established a regime fit for a free people, where citizens are in control of their own destinies instead of being trapped by the circumstances of their births.

In spring 1906, the English sci-fi author H.G. Wells reflected on a visit to the United States in a travelogue titled The Future in America. America, he reported, lacked a social hierarchy with servile and patrician classes. "There is no lower stratum," he wrote, and "no aristocracy at all." Virtually all Americans were the equivalent of Europe's "middle masses," who engaged in "trading and manufacturing" and occupied positions somewhere between "the magnate and the clerk and skilled artisan."

That situation had repercussions for American politics. "The two great political parties in America represent only one English party, the middle-class Liberal party, the party of industrialism and freedom," Wells wrote. "There are no Tories to represent the feudal system, and no Labor party….All Americans are, from the English point of view, Liberals of one sort or another."

As a member of the socialist Fabian Society, Wells did not view the American desire "not only to liberate men but property from State control" as an altogether favorable development. But he recognized it as an essential aspect of the American character.

In the middle of the 20th century, a school of thought that came to be known as "consensus history" echoed that observation. It held, in rough summary, that American culture was distinguished by an underlying "moral unity" of belief in such institutions as free enterprise and the Lockean social contract—that "the American community is a liberal community," as the political scientist Louis Hartz put it.

© Reason.com