Were the Founding Fathers Christians?

(posted by John Birkimer)

I have over the recent years repeatedly encountered folks arguing that the United States is a Christian nation, founded on Christian principles, by Christian forefathers .But I have  often heard that many of the forefathers were Deists. So I decided to do a little light research, consulting Wikipedia on Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, Paine, and Washington. Each passage below is copied from Wikipedia. Looks like Deism, rather than traditional Christianity, was pretty common among this group of forefathers.

Deism, for those who may not know, is a view that a powerful God is responsible for all creation, but arranged that it would function on its own. Thus God does not, according to this view, intervene in the affairs of that creation. Consequently, most deists deny the occurrence of miracles and the claim that Jesus is the son of God. Deists also believed that religious truth could be identified by reason rather than faith.

Ben Franklin

Like the other advocates of republicanism, Franklin emphasized that the new republic could survive only if the people were virtuous. All his life he explored the role of civic and personal virtue, as expressed in Poor Richard’s aphorisms. Franklin felt that organized religion was necessary to keep men good to their fellow men, but rarely attended religious services himself. When Franklin met Voltaire in Paris and asked this great apostle of the Enlightenment to bless his grandson, Voltaire said in English, “God and Liberty,” and added, “this is the only appropriate benediction for the grandson of Monsieur Franklin.”[64]
Franklin’s parents were both pious Puritans.[65] The family attended the old South Church, the most liberal Puritan congregation in Boston, where Benjamin Franklin was baptized in 1706.[66]
Franklin rejected much of his Puritan ideas regarding belief in salvation, hell, Jesus Christ’s divinity, and indeed most religious dogma. He retained a strong faith in a God as the wellspring of morality and goodness in man, and as a Providential actor in history responsible for American independence

John Adams

Adams was raised a Congregationalist, becoming a Unitarian at a time when most of the Congregational churches around Boston were turning to Unitarianism. Adams was educated at Harvard when the influence of deism was growing there, and used deistic terms in his speeches and writing. He believed in the essential goodness of the creation, but did not believe in the divinity of Christ or that God intervened in the affairs of individuals. He also believed that regular church service was beneficial to man’s moral sense. Everett (1966) concludes that “Adams strove for a religion based on a common sense sort of reasonableness” and maintained that religion must change and evolve toward perfection.^[80] Fielding (1940) shows Adams synthesized his beliefs as a Puritan, a Deist, and a Humanist. Adams thought Christianity had once been a fresh revelation, but had now become an instrument of superstition, fraud, and the quest for power by the unscrupulous

Thomas Jefferson

The religious views of Thomas Jefferson diverged widely from the orthodox Christianity of his day. Throughout his life Jefferson was intensely interested in theology, biblical study, and morality.^[1] He is most closely connected with the Episcopal Church, Unitarianism, and the religious philosophy of Deism. As the principal author of the United States Declaration of Independence, he articulated a statement about human rights that most Americans regard as nearly sacred. Together with James Madison, Jefferson carried on a long and successful campaign against state financial support of churches in Virginia.

During his 1800 campaign for the presidency, he had to contend with critics who argued that he was unfit to hold office because he did not have orthodox religious beliefs. It is Jefferson who is credited with propagating the phrase “separation of church and state”. He cut and pasted pieces of the New Testament together to compose a version that excluded any miracles by Jesus. Though he often expressed his opposition to clergy and to Christian doctrines, Jefferson repeatedly expressed his belief in God and his admiration for Jesus as a moral teacher. Opposed to Calvinism, Trinitarianism and what he identified as Platonic elements in Christianity, in 1819 he expressed his religious commitment by his proclamation that he belonged to “a sect by myself”

Thomas Paine

In the second part of The Age of Reason, about his sickness in prison, he says: “. . . I was seized with a fever, that, in its progress, had every symptom of becoming mortal, and from the effects of which I am not recovered. It was then that I remembered, with renewed satisfaction, and congratulated myself most sincerely, on having written the former part of ‘The Age of Reason’”. This quotation encapsulates its gist:

The opinions I have advanced . . . are the effect of the most clear and long-established conviction that the Bible and the Testament are impositions upon the world, that the fall of man, the account of Jesus Christ being the Son of God, and of his dying to appease the wrath of God, and of salvation, by that strange means, are all fabulous inventions, dishonorable to the wisdom and power of the Almighty; that the only true religion is Deism, by which I then meant, and mean now, the belief of one God, and an imitation of his moral character, or the practice of what are called moral virtues – and that it was upon this only (so far as religion is concerned) that I rested all my hopes of happiness hereafter. So say I now – and so help me God.

George Washington

As you will see below, there is disagreement among scholars as to Washington’s religious beliefs.

Scholars’ views regarding Washington’s beliefs

Paul F. Boller, Jr. stated “Washington was no infidel, if by infidel is meant unbeliever. Washington had an unquestioning faith in Providence and, as we have seen, he voiced this faith publicly on numerous occasions. That this was no mere rhetorical flourish on his part, designed for public consumption, is apparent from his constant allusions to Providence in his personal letters. There is every reason to believe, from a careful analysis of religious references in his private correspondence, that Washington’s reliance upon a Grand Designer along Deist lines was as deep-seated and meaningful for his life as, say, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s serene confidence in a Universal Spirit permeating the ever shifting appearances of the everyday world.”^[37]

David L. Holmes, author of The Faiths of the Founding Fathers, in a sidebar article for Britannica categorizes Washington as a Christian deist.^[38] His usage of this category implies a religious spectrum of sorts for deism. Holmes also distinguishes between strict deists and orthodox Christians by their church attendance, participation in religious rites (such as baptism, Holy Communion, and confirmation), the use of religious language, and opinions of contemporary family, friends, clergy, and acquaintances. Regarding these specific parameters, Holmes describes Washington as a Christian deist due to his religious behavior falling somewhere between that of an orthodox Christian and a strict deist. Although Washington was clearly not a communicant, was infrequent in his Church attendance, and did not deem it necessary to participate in religious rites, Holmes labels him as a Christian deist due to his references of God, which resemble strict deistic terminology yet add a Christian dimension of mercy and divine nature. Additionally, Holmes states that Washington’s “dedication to Christianity was clear in his own mind” as to imply that Washington’s own religious self-analysis should be deemed at least as noteworthy as that of critics who claim he was unorthodox.

In 2006 Dr. Peter Lillback published a 1200 page book dedicated entirely to settling the question of Washington’s religious beliefs. The book, George Washington’s Sacred Fire, concluded that Washington was an orthodox Christian within the framework of his time. Lillback claims to have entirely demolished the deist hypothesis.^[39] Author Michael Novak, maintains that Washington could not have been strictly a Deist, but was a Christian:

What we did prove, and quite conclusively, is that Washington cannot be called a Deist—at least, not in a sense that excludes his being Christian. Although he did most often address God in the proper names a Deist might use—such as “Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be” and “Disposer of all human events”—the actions that Washington expected God to perform, as expressed both in his official public prayers (whether as general or as president) and in his private prayers as recorded, are the sorts of actions only the God of the Bible performs: interposing his actions in human events, forgiving sins, enlightening minds, bringing good harvests, intervening on behalf of one party in a struggle between good and evil (in this case, between liberty and the deprivation of liberty), etc. Many persons at the end of the 18th century were both Christians and Deists. But it cannot be said, in the simpleminded sense in which historians have become accustomed to putting it, that Washington was merely a Deist, or even that the God to whom he prayed was expected to behave like a Deist God at all.^[40]

Biographer Barry Schwartz has stated that Washington’s “practice of Christianity was limited and superficial, because he was not himself a Christian. In the enlightened tradition of his day, he was a devout Deist—just as many of the clergymen who knew him suspected”.^[41]

Two recent books exploring Washington’s religious beliefs—Realistic Visionary by Peter Henriques, and Faith and the Presidency by Gary Scott Smith—both categorize Washington as a theistic rationalist which is a hybrid belief system somewhere between strict deism and orthodox Christianity, with rationalism as the predominant element

So this group of forefathers, at least, were pretty much Deists, though Washington may not have been. It is true that these and other forefathers often belonged to traditional religious congregations, but at heart were Deists rather than traditional Christians, according to the authors of the various Wikipedia entries. The likelihood that these leaders would base our country on Christian principles seems quite small.

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