Augustinian America?

"Augustine's legacy would contribute in no small measure to [America's constitution]. The paradox of government—that it was a consequence of sin, yet necessary because of it—would be foremost in the thought of the Founding Fathers. The constitution of the United States of America would be their attempt to rationally manage the conundrum of sin." {James Boyce, BORN BAD: Original Sin and the Making of the Western World} 

I would not have thought to make this connection, but James Boyce seems indisputably correct: the American founders, whatever their formal religious affiliations or beliefs, had imbibed deeply from the well of Augustine's anthropological pessimism—which, far more than the actual doctrine of Original Sin, is the Bishop of Hippo's enduring legacy. 

Boyce begins his chapter on America's founding with James Madison, architect of the constitution, who famously said that if men were angels, no government would be needed; and if angels were to govern men, then no limits on government would be needed. As it stood, however, in 1789, Madison was forced to concede: "It may be a reflection on human nature that...devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?" 

Boyce provides some background: 

The doctrine of original sin had always had political implications. For most of Western history it was used to justify autocratic authority as a necessary constraint on sinful subjects. But since the sixteenth century, it had also become commonplace to use the doctrine to challenge autocracy: if kings and bishops were fallen men too, why should their authority go unquestioned? 

For the architects of the American system, "An ingrained skepticism about human nature guided what could be expected of individuals as rulers and citizens. Liberty meant protecting people from the state and from each other." 

There could be no perfect system, of course, since even the founders were only human: "In the final of the Federalist Papers, [Alexander] Hamilton warned his countrymen against expecting 'to see a perfect work from imperfect men.'" While some at the time had a more sanguine view of human nature, "John Witherspoon, president of Princeton University and a signatory of the Declaration of Independence, [said] 'Others may, if they please, treat the corruption of our nature as a chimera; for my part I see it everywhere, and I feel it every day." 

While Boyce stresses that America was in no way founded as a "Christian nation," it remains a fact that "Protestant Christianity, especially its views of human nature derived from original sin, saturated the culture and permeated the world views of most progressive thinkers of the time." 

Benjamin Franklin, for example, wrote that "Two passions...have a powerful influence on the affairs of men. These are ambition and avarice; the love of power and the love of money." He also reported that "he found men to be 'beings very badly constructed. They are generally more easily provoked than reconciled, more disposed to do mischief to each other than to make reparation, and much more easily deceived than under deceived."  Boyce also cites this passage, from Franklin, on pride: 

"There is, perhaps, not one of our natural passions so hard to subdue as pride. Disguise it, struggle with it, beat it down, stifle it, mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still alive, and will every now and then peep out and show itself; you will see it, perhaps, often in [my] history, for even if I could conceive that I had completely overcome it, I should probably be proud of my humility." 

Boyce then quotes revolutionary icon John Adams: "Whoever [would] found a state, and make proper laws for the government of it, must presume that all men are bad by nature; [and] that they will not fail to show that natural depravity of heart whenever they have fair opportunity." 

Adams also wrote: "Emulation next to self-preservation will forever be the great spring of human actions, and the balance of well-ordered government will alone be able to prevent that emulation from degenerating into dangerous ambition, irregular rivalries, destructive factions, and bloody civil wars." 

Sadly, that passage predicted the course of American history for decades to come. 

James Boyce closes this chapter of his larger narrative by noting a paradox: 

The anthropology of the Founding Fathers meant that they were cautious about the potential of democracy to change society. But over time reverence for the constitution meant that this work of "imperfect man" was increasingly seen to be redemptive in its own right. [The founders] and their words assumed a quasi-Biblical status, announcing how Americans could fulfil the potential of their promised land through the exercise of unfettered personal freedom. It was no coincidence that the deification of the Founding Fathers coincided with a growing certainty in the capacity of human beings to create a godly nation if individuals were freed from regulatory and legal constraints. 

Augustinian pessimism, it seems, gave way to Pelagian optimism and to claims that America is an "exceptional nation". Those claims would have come as a surprise to the realists who framed our founding documents expressly to protect us from ourselves, knowing that we were no better than any other human beings at any other time or in any other place. 

I would say that our history has proven them correct.