The Founding Fathers and Christianity

Although the Declaration of Independence mentioned “Nature’s God” and the “Creator,” the Constitution made no reference to a divine being, Christian or otherwise, and the First Amendment explicitly forbid the establishment of any official church or creed.

If there is a clear legacy bequeathed by the founders, it is the insistence that religion was a private matter in which the state should not interfere.

Once again, diversity is the dominant pattern. Franklin and Jefferson were deists, Washington harbored a pantheistic sense of providential destiny, John Adams began a Congregationalist and ended a Unitarian, and Hamilton was a lukewarm Anglican for most of his life but embraced a more actively Christian posture after his son died in a duel.

(When John Adams and Jefferson discussed the possibility of a more conventional immortality, they tended to describe heaven as a place where they could resume their ongoing argument on earth.)

The pilgrims, as you will recall, were, Christians fleeing Europe in order to escape religious persecution, and they literally began their stay in their new land with the words, “In the name of God, Amen.”

The pilgrims were followed to New England by the Puritans, who created bible-based commonwealths. Those commonwealths practiced the same sort of representative government as their church covenants. Those governmental covenants and compacts numbered more than 100, and were the foundation for our Constitution.

America was indeed founded by bible-believing Christians and based on Christian principles. When they founded this country, the Founding Fathers envisioned a government that would promote and encourage Christianity.

All but two of the first 108 universities founded in America were Christian. This includes the first, Harvard, where the student handbook listed this as Rule #1: “Let every student be plainly instructed and earnestly pressed to consider well, the main end of his life and studies is to know God and Jesus Christ, which is eternal life, John 17:3; and therefore to lay Jesus Christ as the only foundation for our children to follow the moral principles of the Ten Commandments."

In 1777, Continental Congress voted to spend $300,000 to purchase bibles which were to be distributed throughout the 13 colonies! And in 1782, the United States Congress declared, “The Congress of the United States recommends and approves the Holy Bible for use in all schools.

Raised Episcopalian, Jefferson believed that the New Testament had been polluted by early Christians eager to make Christianity palatable to pagans. He believed that they had mixed the words of Jesus with the teachings of Plato and the philosophy of the ancient Greeks. The authentic words of Jesus were still there, he assured his friend, John Adams. He determined to extract the "authentic" words of Jesus from the rubble which he believed surrounded His real words. That book, intended as a primer for the Indians on Christ’s teachings, is commonly known as the "Jefferson Bible."

Written in the front of his personal Bible, he wrote:

"I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus. I have little doubt that our whole country will soon be rallied to the unity of our creator."

In 1803, at the request of President Thomas Jefferson, the United States Congress allocated federal funds for the salary of a preacher and the construction of his church. That same year, Congress, again at Jefferson’s request, ratified a treaty with the Kaskaskia Indians. Congress recognized that most of the members of the tribe had been converted to Christianity, and Congress gave a subsidy of $100.00 a year for seven years for the support of a priest so that he could “instruct as many ... children as possible.”

On April 21, 1803, Jefferson wrote this to Dr. Benjamin Rush (also a signer of the Declaration of Independence):

“My views...are the result of a life of inquiry and reflection, and very different from the anti-Christian system imputed to me by those who know nothing of my opinions. To the corruptions of Christianity I am, indeed, opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian in the only sense in which He wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines in preference to all others.”

In that same letter, he wrote,

“To the corruptions of Christianity I am, indeed opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian, in the only sense in which he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others.”

In a letter to William Short on October 31, 1819, he wrote:

“But the greatest of all the reformers of the depraved religion of His own country, was Jesus of Nazareth.”

You say you are a Calvinist. I am not. I am of a sect by myself, as far as I know.

-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Ezra Stiles Ely, June 25, 1819

Benjamin Franklin, in his Autobiography, wrote that “some books against Deism fell into my hands; . . . The arguments of the Deists . . . appeared to me much stronger than the refutation; in short, I soon became a thorough Deist.”

Franklin confessed to some doubts about Jesus’ divinity, and Thomas Jefferson razored his way through the Gospels, keeping words that seemed to him to be authentically Jesus’, but cutting what he took to be the corruptions of other New Testament contributors.

The human side of all of us demands concrete answers and when we are forced to go on terms of faith we sometimes balk and seek the enlightenment of our own mind to guide us when it comes to God. I myself have had to use my own creative analogies to explain God in this world we live.

So, I do not doubt the varied beliefs of our founding fathers and their evolution as life’s years passed into their twilight.

It is not so much the argument that our nation was meant to be a Christian nation as much as it was meant to be a moral one and one that recognized individual freedom and the ability to live your life in a way that pursued your own happiness but not at the expense of another to do the same. In the time of Moses we lived by the law. Those mandates given to humanity by God so that we may acquire direction and build the spirit within. Then Jesus gave the new covenant. This involved an active role by the Holy Spirit upon our recognition of Jesus Christ as our redeemer. When that took place man was compelled from within to do what was pleasing to God.

In that line of thought I ask that you see all of our founding fathers as merely men with flaws and vices just as we all do.  They were also a virtuous group of men beyond reproach in their desire to build a nation that reflected the compassion of Christ as well as the moral, upright image that God and Christ would be pleased with.

Secular Humanism as infiltrated many aspects of who we are as a nation and through their bastardized attempts at defining what this nation is to represent we have become confused and lacking direction.

No matter the faith of our founding fathers, we must get back to what we as Christians know is right and good. We must not compromise our principles to appease those who want the absence of God for our nation.

Remember above all else, neither God nor this country needs or wants half stepping Christians who through their example invalidate their faith.  “ So because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will [a]spit you out of My mouth.“

Revelation 3:16