The Faith of John Jay

Remarks by Walter Stahr

St. Matthew's Church

Bedford, New York

October 30, 2005

John Jay was baptized into the Church of England within a week of his birth.  Among those present at the service in Trinity Church, New York, were his father Peter Jay, uncle and godfather, John Chambers and his grandfather Augustus Jay.  All three were long-standing members of the Trinity vestry, leaders in the church as well as the city.[1]

But Jay, as you all know, did not grow up in the city:  he grew up out here in Westchester, on what his father called his "delightful place" in Rye.  The family attended Grace Church in Rye and Peter's letters are filled with religious references and requests.  In one letter to English cousins, for example, Peter asked for two books:  Harvey's Meditations and Bishop Taylor's Holy Living and Holy Dying.  In a letter to his son, Peter reported that it had "pleased God to take to himself your little sister Mary."  It was hard but "the Almighty disposes of us."[2]

We are inclined to think that everybody attended church in those good old days and (since the Church of England was established in this part of New York) that most people attended the Church of England.  But this is wrong.  Reverend James Wetmore estimated in 1750 that there were 4000 people in his parish, which reached from Rye to Bedford and beyond.  Of those, however, Wetmore only counted 200 Church of England families and only 55 communicants.  So the Jay family was unusual, not usual, in its strong religious ties.[3]

Anglican priests who were major figures in young Jay's life.  Reverend Wetmore, his parish priest in Rye, was "the kind of dedicated, aggressive Anglican parson who reminded dissenters just how much they disliked the Church of England."  Peter Stouppe, his schoolmaster in New Rochelle, wrote that his parishioners "prefer the hearing of a sermon to all vain and idle amusements."  Above all there was Samuel Johnson, the president of King's College, which Jay entered in 1760.  "No other Anglican priest in the colonies could touch Johnson's reputation as an intellectual, educator, and religious leader."  Johnson was not some remote figure for Jay:  he taught classes and ate meals with the boys, treating them as family members, and focusing above all on their moral and religious instruction.[4] 

After graduating from King's College in 1764, Jay studied law in New York, and practiced law there starting in 1768.  I assume that he attended services at Trinity regularly during this period.  But in early 1774 Jay did something inexplicable.  I am not referring to his decision to join the resistance movement, although resistance was something that almost all Anglicans opposed.  No, I am referring to the decision of John Jay, this faithful Anglican, to marry Sarah Livingston, daughter of America's most prominent anti-Anglican.[5]

William Livingston, starting in the early 1750s, led the effort to make New York's college a non-sectarian rather than an Anglican school.  Livingston argued that the "partial, bigoted and iniquitous plan upon which [King's College] was constructed deserved the opposition of every friend of civil and religious liberty."  And in the 1760s, Livingston led the effort to ensure that New York would not have an Anglican bishop, mocking the "modern, splendid, opulent, court-favored, law-dignified, superb, magnificent, powerful" bishops of England.  Jay's mentor Johnson viewed Livingston as a malicious enemy.[6]

So how do we explain Jay's inexplicable decision?  Surely part of the explanation was that he loved the daughter more than he disliked the father's past anti-Anglican efforts.  We do not have letters from the period of their courtship, but their letters from their early married days, indeed their whole life, are love letters.  And another part of the explanation is that William Livingston by this time was far more concerned about the British army in Boston than English church in New York.  Jay himself, until this time, was not political, but starting in the summer of 1774 he served on committees, and then in congresses, that resisted and then rebelled.

This is perhaps as good a place as any to deal with an unpleasant fact:  Jay hated the Catholic Church.  In the fall of 1774, as part of an address to the British people, he described Catholicism as "a religion that has deluged your island in blood and dispersed impiety, bigotry, persecution, murder and rebellion through every part of the world."  In the spring of 1777, during the course of the debate on the New York constitution, Jay proposed that Catholics should not vote unless they would swear that "no pope, priest, or foreign authority on earth" could "absolve men from sins described in and prohibited by the Holy Gospel."  If there is an explanation for these comments (there is no defense of them) it is that Jay was never able to forgive the Catholic Church for how it persecuted his Protestant ancestors.[7]

More than any other first-rank leader, Jay used religion to rally the Americans.  In late 1776, when the cause seemed hopeless, Jay wrote a pamphlet for the New York legislature.  His main argument was that freedom was a divine gift and defending freedom a religious duty.  "Being bound by the strongest obligations to defend the inheritance which God hath given us, to Him we referred our Cause, and opposed the assaults of our taskmasters, being determined to die free than live slaves and entail bondage on our children."  Like a revival preacher, Jay called on his readers to repent.  "The King of Heaven is not like the King of Britain, implacable.  If we turn from our sins, He will turn from His anger."  The American cause was "the cause of God, of human nature and posterity."  Anyone who considered this, and the various strengths of the American people, "must entertain very improper ideas of the Divine justice to which we have appealed . . . to harbor the least doubt of our being successful."[8]

Jay's own faith was tested often during the Revolution, such as during the summer of 1780.  John and Sarah were living in Spain, where he was having no success with the Spanish diplomats, and she was finding it hard to live "in a country whose customs, language and religion are the very reverse of our own."  When Sarah gave birth to a little girl, both parents were overjoyed.  John sent his father-in-law an amused account of the local custom of naming a child after its patron saint, "for they are so happy as to have at least one saint for every day in the year."  But then tragedy:  the little girl fell ill and died.  Sarah broke off a letter to her mother, asking her to excuse the tearstains.  "Heaven," she wrote, is "in every purpose wise," so it must have given the little girl "so many graces" in order to "extend our views even to those regions of bliss where she has arrived before us."[9]

The Jays returned to New York after the Revolution and returned to Trinity Church.  In February of 1785, Jay was elected to the vestry, indeed as a warden, a position in which he served through the spring of 1791.  I regret to report that Jay was not especially good at attending vestry meetings; he was only present ten times over the span of six years.

But he was nevertheless a pillar of the church.  Trinity was broke at this time; it did not even have enough money to pay the rent on the rector's house.  Jay reported that the "executors of the late Peter Jay," meaning of course himself and his brothers, were prepared to lend 1200 pounds without any fixed repayment date.  Jay was also one of those who donated to build a new church to replace the one which had burned down during the British occupation.  When the foundation stone was laid in the summer of 1788, it bore the names not only of the bishop but also of the two wardens, James Duane and John Jay.[10]

Most important, Jay was a leader in the effort to sort out the relation between the American and the English churches.  There was a complicated controversy about whether American bishops should be ordained by Danish, Scottish, or English bishops.  During the course of this, Jay expressed some mildly heretical views.  In a letter John Adams in London, enlisting him to discuss the issues with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Jay wrote that he "did not consider bishops as very important to our salvation."  Jay was in particular opposed to Bishop Samuel Seabury, whom he remembered and disliked from the Revolution, when Seabury had been an ardent Loyalist.  Seabury's "high church principles," Jay wrote, "do not quadrate either with the political principles of our Episcopalians in general or with those on which our Revolution and Constitution are founded."  Does one hear the echo of Jay's father-in-law Livingston?[11]

Jay's faith also led him into another political controversy:  over the future of slavery in America.  The religious sources of Jay's views are clear from his famous letter to Egbert Benson.  "An excellent law might be made out of the Pennsylvania one for the gradual abolition of slavery.  Till America comes into this measure her prayers to heaven for liberty will be impious.  This is a strong expression but just. . . . I believe God governs this world, and I believe it to be a maxim in His as in our court that those who ask for equity ought to do it."  Jay and some Anglican friends, along with some Quakers, formed the New York Manumission Society, and Jay as governor signed a law providing for gradual abolition in New York.  Before we praise him too much, however, we need to recall that he owned some of his own slaves into the early 1800s.[12]

For Jay, politics and religion were not separate spheres; they were intimately connected.  In the summer of 1786, writing to Washington, Jay noted that during the war he "firmly believed that we should ultimately succeed because I was convinced that Justice was with us."  Now, however, "we are going and doing wrong, and therefore I look forward to Evils and Calamities."  "That we shall again recover," he continued, "I have no doubt: such a variety of circumstances would not almost miraculously have combined to liberate and make us a Nation for transient or unimportant purposes."  His language is not as explicitly religious here as it was in his address to the New Yorkers, but it is unmistakably grounded in his reading of the Bible.[13]

Washington in the fall of 1789 appointed his friend as Chief Justice of the United States.  Jay did not as Chief Justice decide any cases on religion (as best I can tell the Court did not address religion until 1815) although he did not by any means avoid religion.  Before he set out on his first set of circuit courts, he was asked whether he wanted a chaplain to attend court in Connecticut.  He responded "the custom in New England of a clergyman's attending should in my opinion be observed and continued."  And indeed it was:  the newspaper reports generally note that the "throne of grace" was addressed by some leading clergyman.[14]

In the summer of 1795, Jay was elected Governor of New York.  Not long thereafter, yellow fever killed several hundred people in and around New York City.  In November, after the disease abated, Governor Jay issued a proclamation, noting that the recent plague "reminds us that prosperity and adversity are in [God's] hands."  He was not sure that he could require a day of thanksgiving, but he recommended that the people set aside Thursday November 26 "as a day of prayer and thanksgiving."[15]

Jay's political friends urged him to run for a third term as governor in the spring of 1801, but, believing that he had done his duty over the course of nearly three decades, he finally retired.  He could not retire to the farm where he had grown up, in Rye, because his brother, "blind Peter," now lived there.  So he came here, to Bedford, and rebuilt the farmhouse.

Less than a year later, Sarah died.  According to their son, John was at his wife's side when she died, and then led their children "into an adjoining room, where with a firm voice but glistening eye, read to them the fifteenth chapter of Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, thus leading their thoughts to that day when the lifeless but beloved form they had just left would rise to glory and immortality."  I do not believe that the scene was quite as calm as the one described by William, but I have no doubt that it was John's faith that carried him through the last years of his life.[16]

Jay's initial effort, in 1804, to obtain funding from Trinity Church for the Bedford church was not successful.  But that effort, and his mere presence here, forced Trinity to focus on Bedford.  In 1805, according to one of the histories, Trinity "liberally endowed the united churches of Bedford and North Castle with the sum of one thousand dollars."  One assumes that Jay also reached into his own pocket to help pay for this building:  there were, after all, only ten communicants at the time.[17]

Jay's letters from his retirement years are rich in religious references and arguments.  From this mass of material, there is one sentence that is quoted more often than any other.  "Providence has given to our people the choice of their rulers, and it is the duty as well as the privilege and interest of our Christian nation to select and prefer Christian rulers."  You can imagine the people who quote this.  The context, however, is generally not provided.  Jay was refuting the argument that Christians should never go to war.  Part of his argument was that "real Christians will abstain from violating the rights of others, and therefore will not provoke war."  Other nations, Jay noted, "have peace or war at the will and pleasure of rulers whom they do not elect, and who are not always wise or virtuous."  Americans, however, were blessed with the right to select their own rulers, and should consider moral character in that process.[18]

Jay generally lived a very retired life in Bedford, leaving rarely, declining invitations.  In 1821, however, he agreed to serve as President of the American Bible Society.  Jay's remarks to the society about "the heathen" in Asia and Africa may grate on our modern ears, but we must not forget that it was the evangelical Christians of this era who brought the Gospel to every corner of the earth.

So what then was the faith of John Jay?  In a sense it was simple; it was the faith we profess in the Nicene Creed.  But Jay's faith was also intimately connected with his patriotism;  he believed that God had blessed America, and that Americans should "at all times and in all places" give thanks to God.  He summed it up in 1826, on the fiftieth anniversary of the summer of 1776, when he expressed his "earnest hope that the peace, happiness and prosperity enjoyed by our beloved country, may induce those who direct our national councils to recommend a general and public return of praise and thanksgiving to Him from whose goodness these blessings descend."[19]