The US Was Not Founded on Christianity—Keep It Out of Politics
The US Founding Fathers were certainly religious, but most questioned the Bible, the intervention of God in the affairs of man, and even the divinity of Christ. They would be appalled by modern US politics.
After the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Alexander Hamilton was asked why God wasn’t mentioned in the country’s founding document. “We forgot” he responded snarkily. This may come as a surprise to some, as it seems to be common knowledge in some circles that the US Founding Fathers were devout Christians and the Constitution they crafted is heavy on the God references. They weren’t, and it’s not. In fact, the only reference to the almighty is the common phrase to introduce dates “in the year of our Lord” in Article VII.
Despite this nugget of easy to obtain information, many Americans believe the Constitution was inspired by Christ and that the country is supposed to be based on Christian values. For example, in the wake of Trump’s 2016 win, researchers from Oxford sought to explain why so many people voted for him. They took into account many factors such as economic anxieties, sexism, racism, conspiracy theories, etc., yet they found that the most influential was fear of the country losing its Christian heritage. Trump who began to profess his faith in Christ when he decided to run for the presidency, was seen by many Republicans to be a defender of the faith, the country’s Christian foundation, and more importantly the country’s Christian future. The researchers said that “Christian nationalism operates as a unique and independent ideology that can influence political actions by calling forth a defense of mythological narratives about America’s distinctively Christian heritage and future.”
And they’re right: America’s Christian heritage is a myth. How do I know? Because I read the actual words written by the Founding Fathers.
“The government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion” —Treaty of Tripoli, Signed by President John Adams in 1796
“Hostile to Liberty”
Thomas Jefferson is arguably the most important Founding Father, as he was the author of the Declaration of Independence, the 3rd president, 2nd vice president, the governor of Virginia, a delegate to the 2nd Continental Congress, responsible for doubling the size of the country, among many other reasons.
When it came to religion, it’s no doubt that Jefferson believed in God and morality and that these beliefs influenced how he helped shape the country. He was an Anglican in name, having been raised in the Church of England. As a boy he followed the tenets of his faith and claimed that his earliest memory was reciting the Lord’s Prayer at the dinner table. Throughout his life, he attended church regularly, donated to countless churches, designed a church for a local congregation, and carried a heavily-annotated and well-worn prayer book with him wherever he went.
But contrary to popular belief, he hated organized religion, was fearful of religion’s influence on politics, and doubted the divinity of Christ.
First, Jefferson was not shy about criticizing clergymen and their congregations. He believed they wielded too much power and interjected their own agendas into their teachings. In 1814, he wrote to his friend Horatio Spafford “In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.” By this he means that religion and those that control it have historically been able to manipulate the public, that it has always been a tool for the powerful to stay in power. According to Jefferson, organized religion has done more damage to liberty “than all the million of men in arms of Bonaparte.” This certainly doesn’t sound like someone that wanted to create a country founded on religion, despite what many today believe.
Second, based on his distrust of organized religion, Jefferson drafted the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom in 1777. Enacted in 1786, this document became the inspiration for the 1st Amendment a year later, as it laid out the framework for a hard wall between church and state. It says “our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than our opinions in physics or geometry.” This is an unambiguous nod to Voltaire, another Enlightenment Era heavy-weight, who said “There are no sects in geometry. One does not speak of a Euclidean, an Archimedean.” Jefferson point here is that if religion, math, etc. are true, then dividing into groups with different beliefs means that these groups are inevitably following a perversion of the truth. That is, the truth is the truth and not open to interpretation, which explains why there aren’t different groups of mathematicians arguing over the basics of geometry. Therefore, Jefferson believed that when a religious group tries to impose their beliefs on others through politics, they must be promoting a twisted belief system, leading to twisted laws. Jefferson knew this only too well, which is why he was so staunchly against religious intrusion into politics.
Third, Jefferson, as were the other Founding Fathers, was a product of the Enlightenment, a 17th and 18th century intellectual movement that emphasized reason, science, skepticism, and individualism. In his notes from 1781 he wrote “Reason and persuasion are the only practicable instruments. To make way for these, free enquiry must be indulged; and how can we wish others to indulge it while we refuse it ourselves.” For Jefferson and many followers of the Enlightenment, the only religious belief that made sense was Deism, which explains that God may exist and may have created the universe, but he doesn’t intervene in his creation. In Jefferson’s Secrets: Death and Desire at Monticello Burstein says that Jefferson “accepted God in the abstract, as the architect of the universe; but he refuted the notion of an active, omnipresent god, which belief he saw to have been generated solely by historical uncertainties, the most apparent being human anxiety over death.”
The natural extension of this idea is that the divinity of Christ is called into question. If God doesn’t get involved, then Christ is not the son of God, as sending his son to die for our sins would be an involvement. Jefferson privately suffered with this idea. In fact, although it was unknown while he was alive, Jefferson created his own version of the Bible. Known today as the Jefferson Bible, it includes what he saw as the important philosophical teachings of Christ, yet it removes all references to the supernatural. Any mention of miracles, the afterlife, the Holy Spirit, Christ being the son of God, etc. were not included because Jefferson thought they were not inline with his Enlightenment logic. His own great-grandson said that he “did not believe in the miracles, nor the divinity of Christ, nor the doctrine of the atonement.” However, he loved the philosophy of Christ, the idea of future rewards and punishments, the power of prayer, and the possibility of an afterlife.
With the above in mind, it’s abundantly clear that Jefferson would’ve hated the power that Christianity has on modern American politics.
“Appeared to Me Unintelligible”
The oldest and most traveled of the Founding Fathers, Benjamin Franklin played a special role in the early days of the country. For example, he negotiated the Treaty of Paris to end the Revolutionary War, helped draft the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and convinced the French to support the colonies against Britain.
But, like Jefferson, Franklin had his doubts about Christianity. He said “I had been religiously educated as a Presbyterian; and tho’ some of the dogmas of that persuasion, such as the eternal decrees of God, election, reprobation, etc., appeared to me unintelligible, others doubtful, and I early absented myself from the public assemblies of the sect, Sunday being my studying day, I never was without religious principles.” What this means is that he liked the basics of Christianity, just not the supernatural aspects. He liked the values and believed they were necessary for the moral functioning of society, although through his extensive reading and traveling he held all religions in high-esteem, while not necessarily believing in any of them.
For example, Franklin was unsure about the veracity of the Bible. He said “I was scarce fifteen, when, after doubting by turns of several points, as I found them disputed in the different books I read, I began to doubt of Revelation itself.” As a product of the Enlightenment, Franklin’s strong sense of reason conflicted with the idea that God revealed Truth to men, an essential tenet of most major religions. Instead, Franklin was a “thorough Deist,” believing that God had no interest in the lives of humans, either through miracles or Revelation. In fact, Franklin even flirted with the idea of pantheism. In The Faiths of Our Fathers Alf Mapp described his beliefs thusly: “Though he had proposed that the Supreme God remained aloof from human affairs, he had held that the subordinate gods took an active interest in events in their individual worlds.”
Furthermore, like other Enlightenment Deists, Franklin questioned the divinity of Christ. He wrote to his friend Ezra Stiles that he thinks Christ’s “system of morals and his religion, as he left them to us, the best the world ever saw or is like to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting changes, and I have, with most of the present Dissenters in England, some doubts as to his Divinity.” Therefore, like Jefferson, Franklin sought to remove the supernatural from Christ’s teachings, as evidenced by his rewriting the Lord’s Prayer and his Book of Common Prayer to be more “reasonable.”
Franklin also hated organized religion. He found that when people got into groups, they became arrogant. He wrote to his father that he thinks a man “must have a good deal of vanity who believes, and a good deal of boldness who affirms, that all the doctrines he holds are true, and all he rejects are false. And perhaps the same may be justly said of every sect, church, and society of men, when they assume to themselves that infallibility which they deny to the Pope and councils.” Perhaps this is why he was such a passionate defender of the 1st Amendment, in particular its separation of church and state.
After reading the many writings of Benjamin Franklin, it’s bizarre that anyone would think he was a devout Christian and that he helped found a Christian country.
“Prophets In the Stocks”
John Adams had his fingers in just about all major roles in the country’s early days. He was a prominent figure in drafting the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Treaty of Paris, served as the 2nd president and 1st vice president, was the ambassador to Britain and the Netherlands, and was 1 of 5 people administering the Revolutionary War.
Nailing down his religious beliefs, though, is more difficult than the other Founding Fathers because he believed religion should be kept to oneself. He said that his opinions “on religious subjects ought not to be of any consequence to any but myself.” This tells us that, like many of the other Founding Fathers, he thought religion should be kept out of politics.
From what scholars can discern, Adams’ faith in Christianity was shaky. For his book John Adams: Party of One author James Grant pored over Adams’ personal writings and discovered that he rarely used the words “Christ” or “Christian.” Perhaps this is because he was ardently adhering to his keep-it-to-yourself philosophy, or maybe it signifies that Christianity didn’t play much of a role in his life. The latter is backed up by the fact that his writings referred rather to “Providence,” which is an Old Testament way of referring to God. When this is taken into consideration, his beliefs seem to be, not surprisingly, Deist, in that he didn’t put much weight on Christ or the New Testament. In his book Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America Waldman doubled down on this idea when he said that Adams “had rejected the divinity of Jesus, the Trinity, and the infallibility of Scripture, as did many a Boston Unitarian. But he believed in God and in God’s governance of the world.”
Furthermore, Adams seemed to have a particular disdain for religion’s influence on society. In an 1812 letter to Jefferson, he said that he had “forgotten the custom of putting Prophets in the Stocks.” This is in reference to Jeremiah 20 in the Bible, in which the Judean prophet Jeremiah was put in the stocks in Jerusalem’s Upper Gate of Benjamin for professing his religion. Adams continues that supporting such a stance was likely to be thought blasphemous “but I could not help wishing that the ancient practice had been continued down to more modern times and that all the Prophets at least from Peter the Hermit, to Nimrod Hews inclusively, had been confined in the Stocks and prevented from spreading so many delusions and shedding so much blood.” In 1761 Adams wrote his friend Samuel Quincy that found the idea of salvation only being possible through Christ “detestable,” “invidious,” “hurtful,” “and would discourage the practice of virtue.”
So yet again, after reading the actual words on the Founding Fathers, it’s clear they weren’t Christians and the US is not supposed to be a Christian country.
Final Thoughts
When you perform a similar analysis of George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and other Founding Fathers’ writings the conclusion is more or less the same, in that they were Christians only on the surface. As products of the Enlightenment, they were scientists and scholars that relied on reason, allowing them to poke holes in Christian doctrine and making them suspicious of organized religion. Gordon Wood put it best:
“At the time of the Revolution most of the founding fathers had not put much emotional stock in religion, even when they were regular churchgoers. As enlightened gentlemen, they abhorred ‘that gloomy superstition disseminated by ignorant illiberal preachers’ and looked forward to the day when ‘the phantom of darkness will be dispelled by the rays of science, and the bright charms of rising civilization.’ At best, most of the revolutionary gentry only passively believed in organized Christianity and, at worst, privately scorned and ridiculed it.”
The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, Gordon S. Wood
Despite the above, nearly half of the country believes that the Founding Fathers were Christian and that they designed a specifically Christian country. This leads to exactly what the Founding Fathers feared: religion being used to create laws. For example, in September 2021, Texas Republicans passed a law banning abortion after 6 weeks and essentially deputizes private citizens to enforce it. Texas Governor Gregg Abbott justified such a draconian law by saying that “Our creator endowed us with the right to life, and yet millions of children lose their right to life every year because of abortion,” suggesting religious motivations.
Furthermore, the battle over women’s rights, especially in Texas, is largely fueled by religious organizations like the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, the Mormon Church, the Conservative Baptist Association of America, etc. Organizations like these are extremely well-funded and extremely politically active, which the Founding Fathers never wanted. Religion has even infiltrated the Supreme Court, which had the chance to strike down Texas’ anti-abortion law but refused, likely due to the heavy conservative leanings of Justices like Amy Coney Barrett.
Therefore, the modern US landscape is not what the Founding Fathers intended. As products of the Enlightenment, they were not devout Christians, with many ridiculing it behind closed doors, and the founding documents almost never reference God and never reference Christ. The Founding Fathers did what they could to keep religion’s destructive nature out of politics and so should we.
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