Religion and the Founding Fathers

There has been a lot of discussion recently about whether the United States is a Christian nation with much of it focusing on the questions of whether the founders of the republic were Christians and whether they founded the country as a Christian nation. In attempting to answer those questions sensibly, the first thing one has to know is what precisely one means by a Christian.

Historically, for most of Europe for most of a thousand and more years before the American Revolution being a Christian meant being a member of the Roman Catholic Church. Since this definition excludes millions of people who profess to be Christians, it is not usually employed in general discussion in present times, being seen as too narrow. A more contemporary and ecumenical definition might say a Christian is someone who believes in one god (either in a strict monotheism or in a de facto pantheon where one divinity reigns supreme) and sees virtue and wisdom in the moral teachings of the Bible. However, this definition is too broad, as it would at a minimum label Jews and Moslems as Christians, something neither Jews, Moslems, nor the doctrines of most Christian churches believe to be true. The right definition is the one that goes to the heart of what distinguishes Christianity from other religions: a Christian is a person who believes in the divinity of Jesus and in the trinity.

One also needs to know what one means by a founding father. If one means anybody who was an adult between 1776 and 1783 and supported the revolution, then clearly most were Christians. Of course so were most of the Tories who sided with the British and most of the indifferent who did not take a side. The population of the colonies was comprised in overwhelming majority of Protestant Christians. However, when referring to the founding fathers, most people are not talking about the population of colonial America as a whole but about the men who shaped and led the creation of the new nation. The debate focuses on whether they were Christians founding a Christian nation.

Starting with the four most important and influential founders - Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, and Paine - we see that many were not. In the case of Jefferson and Paine this is certain. Paine in an entire book and Jefferson in numerous writings make it quite explicit that they are deists who reject both the divinity of Jesus and the idea of the trinity. While Franklin is not as straightforward or emphatic, his writings still makes his deism clear enough. There is less direct evidence with Washington and more ambiguity. However the higher probability and the preponderance of evidence lie with the hypothesis that he too was a deist rather than a Christian. Beyond these four, John Adams was a Unitarian, and Ethan Allen, Gouverneur Morris and probably James Madison were also not Christians. Neither were many others of the founding fathers. The claims that they almost all were are simply false.

It is equally false to assert that, even if the most important founders were not Christians, Christianity was the decisive and shaping influence on the republic or its constitution. By 1776 Christianity had been the dominant religion of Europe for over a millennium. In that time Europe saw states that really were Christian through and through – imperial Spain, czarist Russia, the Papal states in Italy, and many others. Indeed for much of that time virtually every nation and principality in Europe not under Islamic rule was explicitly a Christian state. Most of them were also despotisms. This by itself, apart from any knowledge of the history of the philosophies of the Enlightenment and their truly decisive influence on the founders, should offer conclusive evidence that a Christian population is not a sufficient condition for a liberal constitutional republic and that something more was at work in the founding of the United States.

There is of course a sense in which America is and always has been a Christian nation. Most Americans are Christians, and their religious beliefs and traditions influence their actions. This would not be the same country if, say, Islam or animism were the preponderant religion. However these obvious facts are far from what the special pleaders on the religious right are claiming.