Despite popular belief, founding fathers were not all Christians

Was the United States founded on Christianity? Were our most respected and revered founding fathers devout Christians? The answer, despite the protestations of the religious right, is "no."

John Adams, our second president, explained that our country was "founded on the natural authority of the people alone, without a pretense of miracle or mystery." It's also worth mentioning that the U.S. Constitution, the legal foundation of our nation, is an entirely secular document; there is absolutely no mention of God, Jesus or Christianity.

The Treaty of Tripoli, written during the administration of George Washington, clearly indicates how uncontroversial our secular status was during the period of our founding. The treaty states unequivocally: "the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion." That ought to be clear enough for even a raving, evolution-denying theocrat to understand. Read aloud on the floor of the Senate, the treaty was unanimously ratified, without debate or dissension, and signed into law in 1797 by President John Adams.

The Rev. Bird Wilson, an Episcopal minister and historian, lamented in an 1831 sermon, "The founders of our nation were nearly all Infidels." Wilson's hyperbole aside, many of our best-known founders were highly influenced by the Enlightenment, and were Deists, not traditional Christians. In fact, several founders had contempt for central myths of Christianity, and many shared a profound concern about the tendency of organized religion to become tyrannical and malevolent.

Founding father Thomas Jefferson, our third and arguably most brilliant president, made his overall opinion of Christianity clear in a letter to John Adams: "the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter" (the Goddess Minerva sprang forth, fully grown, from Jupiter's brain).

Jefferson considered the supernatural aspects of Christianity (trinity, virgin birth, resurrection, etc.) as equivalent to the ridiculous and primitive beliefs of ancient mythology, and was offended by the rampant absurdity within the New Testament. He was, however, impressed by the moral philosophy of Jesus. Jefferson wrote of the gospels, "I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence; and others, again, of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism." This conflict drove Jefferson to the pinnacle of blasphemy; he gutted the Bible. Jefferson sought to distill the agreeable moral insights of Jesus by "abstracting what is really his from the rubbish in which it is buried," separating the "diamond from the dunghill."

With razor blade and paste, Jefferson crafted a version of the Bible that wasn't abhorrent to his rational mind. Consequently, the "Jefferson Bible" contains no reference to divinity, angels, miracles or virgin birth; it ends without any mention of resurrection.

Another founding father, Thomas Paine, a radical pamphleteer who greatly influenced and aided the American Revolution with his potent writing, was a harsh and outspoken critic of Christianity.

The State News - www.statenews.com

Our Godless Constitution

(The Nation) This column from The Nation was written by Brooke Allen.

"It is hard to believe that George Bush has ever read the works of George Orwell, but he seems, somehow, to have grasped a few Orwellian precepts. The lesson the President has learned best -- and certainly the one that has been the most useful to him -- is the axiom that if you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it. One of his Administration's current favorites is the whopper about America having been founded on Christian principles. Our nation was founded not on Christian principles but on Enlightenment ones. God only entered the picture as a very minor player, and Jesus Christ was conspicuously absent.

Our Constitution makes no mention whatever of God. The omission was too obvious to have been anything but deliberate, in spite of Alexander Hamilton's flippant responses when asked about it: According to one account, he said that the new nation was not in need of "foreign aid"; according to another, he simply said "we forgot." But as Hamilton's biographer Ron Chernow points out, Hamilton never forgot anything important.

In the eighty-five essays that make up The Federalist, God is mentioned only twice (both times by Madison, who uses the word, as Gore Vidal has remarked, in the "only Heaven knows" sense). In the Declaration of Independence, He gets two brief nods: a reference to "the Laws of Nature and Nature's God," and the famous line about men being "endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights." More blatant official references to a deity date from long after the founding period: "In God We Trust" did not appear on our coinage until the Civil War, and "under God" was introduced into the Pledge of Allegiance during the McCarthy hysteria in 1954 [see Elisabeth Sifton, "The Battle Over the Pledge," April 5, 2004].

In 1797 our government concluded a "Treaty of Peace and Friendship between the United States of America and the Bey and Subjects of Tripoli, or Barbary," now known simply as the Treaty of Tripoli. Article 11 of the treaty contains these words:

"As the Government of the United States... is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion -- as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity of Musselmen -- and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries."

This document was endorsed by Secretary of State Timothy Pickering and President John Adams. It was then sent to the Senate for ratification; the vote was unanimous. It is worth pointing out that although this was the 339th time a recorded vote had been required by the Senate, it was only the third unanimous vote in the Senate's history. There is no record of debate or dissent. The text of the treaty was printed in full in the Philadelphia Gazette and in two New York papers, but there were no screams of outrage, as one might expect today.

The Founding Fathers were not religious men, and they fought hard to erect, in Thomas Jefferson's words, "a wall of separation between church and state." John Adams opined that if they were not restrained by legal measures, Puritans -- the fundamentalists of their day -- would "whip and crop, and pillory and roast." The historical epoch had afforded these men ample opportunity to observe the corruption to which established priesthoods were liable, as well as "the impious presumption of legislators and rulers," as Jefferson wrote, "civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavoring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all time."

If we define a Christian as a person who believes in the divinity of Jesus Christ, then it is safe to say that some of the key Founding Fathers were not Christians at all. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine were deists -- that is, they believed in one Supreme Being but rejected revelation and all the supernatural elements of the Christian Church; the word of the Creator, they believed, could best be read in Nature. John Adams was a professed liberal Unitarian, but he, too, in his private correspondence seems more deist than Christian.

George Washington and James Madison also leaned toward deism, although neither took much interest in religious matters. Madison believed that "religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprize." He spoke of the "almost fifteen centuries" during which Christianity had been on trial: "What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution." If Washington mentioned the Almighty in a public address, as he occasionally did, he was careful to refer to Him not as "God" but with some nondenominational moniker like "Great Author" or "Almighty Being." It is interesting to note that the Father of our Country spoke no words of a religious nature on his deathbed, although fully aware that he was dying, and did not ask for a man of God to be present; his last act was to take his own pulse, the consummate gesture of a creature of the age of scientific rationalism.

Tom Paine, a polemicist rather than a politician, could afford to be perfectly honest about his religious beliefs, which were baldly deist in the tradition of Voltaire: "I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life.... I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church." This is how he opened The Age of Reason, his virulent attack on Christianity. In it he railed against the "obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness" of the Old Testament, "a history of wickedness, that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind." The New Testament is less brutalizing but more absurd, the story of Christ's divine genesis a "fable, which for absurdity and extravagance is not exceeded by any thing that is to be found in the mythology of the ancients." He held the idea of the Resurrection in especial ridicule: Indeed, "the wretched contrivance with which this latter part is told, exceeds every thing that went before it." Paine was careful to contrast the tortuous twists of theology with the pure clarity of deism. "The true deist has but one Deity; and his religion consists in contemplating the power, wisdom, and benignity of the Deity in his works, and in endeavoring to imitate him in every thing moral, scientifical, and mechanical."

Paine's rhetoric was so fervent that he was inevitably branded an atheist. Men like Franklin, Adams and Jefferson could not risk being tarred with that brush, and in fact Jefferson got into a good deal of trouble for continuing his friendship with Paine and entertaining him at Monticello. These statesmen had to be far more circumspect than the turbulent Paine, yet if we examine their beliefs it is all but impossible to see just how theirs differed from his."

Read the entire article at CBSNews.com

Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, January 24, 1814

"The whole history of these books [the Gospels] is so defective and doubtful that it seems vain to attempt minute enquiry into it: and such tricks have been played with their text, and with the texts of other books relating to them, that we have a right, from that cause, to entertain much doubt what parts of them are genuine. In the New Testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts, as to pick out diamonds from dunghills."

Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, January 24, 1814

John Adams, A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America

One other of these laws deserves particular notice. In private, every family were free to worship the gods in their own way ; and in public, though certain forms were required, yet there was not any penalty annexed to the omission of them, as the punishment of offenses in this matter was left to the offended god. This, probably, was the source of that wise and humane toleration which does so much honour to the Romans, and reflects disgrace on almost every Christian nation.

John Adams, "A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America" (1787-88)

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John Adams, A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America

"Thirteen governments [of the original states] thus founded on the natural authority of the people alone, without a pretence of miracle or mystery, and which are destined to spread over the northern part of that whole quarter of the globe, are a great point gained in favor of the rights of mankind."

John Adams, "A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America" (1787-88)

Text of the Preface at Constitution.org. Link to the Table of Contents of the entire work.

John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson, July 16, 1814

"Cabalistic Christianity, which is Catholic Christianity, and which has prevailed for 1,500 years, has received a mortal wound, of which the monster must finally die. Yet so strong is his constitution, that he may endure for centuries before he expires."

John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson, July 16, 1814

Scanned letter at The Library of Congress

John Adams, A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America

"The United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature; and if men are now sufficiently enlightened to disabuse themselves of artifice, imposture, hypocrisy, and superstition, they will consider this event as an era in their history. Although the detail of the formation of the American governments is at present little known or regarded either in Europe or in America, it may hereafter become an object of curiosity. It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the influence of Heaven, more than those at work upon ships or houses, or laboring in merchandise or agriculture; it will forever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses."

John Adams, "A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America" (1787-88)

Text of the Preface at Constitution.org. Link to the Table of Contents of the entire work.

Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823

"One day the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in the United States will tear down the artificial scaffolding of Christianity. And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as His father, in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter."

Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823

Scanned letter at The Library of Congress
Transcript at The Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library

Thomas Jefferson, to John Adams, 1803

"It is too late in the day for men of sincerity to pretend they believe in the Platonic mysticisms that three are one, and one is three; and yet that the one is not three, and the three are not one. But this constitutes the craft, the power and the profit of the priests."

Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, August 22, 1813

Transcript at The Library of Congress
Scanned letter at The Library of Congress

Thomas Jefferson to John Adams

"I had believed that [Connecticut was] the last retreat of monkish darkness, bigotry, and abhorrence of those advances of the mind which had carried the other States a century ahead of them. ... I join you, therefore, in sincere congratulations that this den of the priesthood is at length broken up, and that a Protestant Popedom is no longer to disgrace the American history and character. If by religion we are to understand sectarian dogmas, in which no two of them agree, then your exclamation on that hypothesis is just, 'that this would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it.'

Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, May 5, 1817

Scanned letter at The Library of Congress

Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, October 28, 1813

"The law for religious freedom, which made a part of this system, having put down the aristocracy of the clergy, and restored to the citizen the freedom of the mind, and those of entails and descents nurturing an equality of condition among them, this on education would have raised the mass of the people to the high ground of moral respectability necessary to their own safety, and to orderly government; and would have completed the great object of qualifying them to select the veritable aristoi, for the trusts of government, to the exclusion of the pseudalists; and the same Theognis who has furnished the epigraphs of your two letters, assures us that "." Although this law has not yet been acted on but in a small and inefficient degree, it is still considered as before the legislature, with other bills of the revised code, not yet taken up, and I have great hope that some patriotic spirit will, at a favorable moment, call it up, and make it the key-stone of the arch of our government."

Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, October 28, 1813

Scanned letter at The Library of Congress
Transcript at The Library of Congress