Could Our Founding Fathers Pass A Christian Religious Test?
Is it is true that our founders were Christians who constructed our system of government based upon the Bible? Have you ever wondered why 
Christian Nationalists are continually publishing and circulating fake quote and documents purported to be from a founding father? The reason is quite simple: without fake quotes and documents, there is no way to show that our leading founding fathers were Christians. While right-wing theocons continually claim that our founders were all Christians who used the bible as source material in constructing our system of civil government, they never actually prove it – if pressed, they fall more than woefully short of the mark.
Here’s where the rubber meets the road: I came up with this simple test that will help definitively decide whether a founding father can be considered to have been a Christian. This test is so easy, even Adolf Hitler was able to pass with the greatest of ease. If it true that our founders were Christians, the following test below should present few problems for Christian Nationalists:
Which of the following men, using their own writings, could pass the following religious test from Article 22 of the Delaware Constitution (Taken from pseudo-historian David Barton’s book, The Myth of Separation):
1.) George Washington
2.) Thomas Jefferson
3.) John Adams
4.) Ben Franklin
5.) James Madison
6.) Adolf Hitler
Here’s the religious test:
“Every person who shall be chosen a member of either house, or appointed to any office or place of trust…shall…make and subscribe the following declaration, to wit: ‘I,—, do profess faith in God the Father, and in Jesus Christ His Son, and in the Holy Ghost, one God, blessed for evermore; and I do acknowledge the holy scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be given by divine inspiration.”
Using any of their public or private writings, find quotes – that are in proper context – that would pass each of the founders listed. I will produce statements that exclude several of the founders from passing this Christian test using their own words.
I contend that the first five men did not believe in the virgin birth, the miracles, the resurrection, the divine inspiration of the bible, nor the divinity of Christ. These are basic requirements one must meet in order to properly be called a “Christian.” If you think any of the founders listed above could pass this test, please feel free to find such information. I’d love to see it. Hitler however, would come much closer to passing this religious test than any of our said fathers. Hitler made far more definitive statements of Christian faith than any of the founders I have listed.
The following excludes Thomas Jefferson:
“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. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away [with] all this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this the most venerated reformer of human errors.” -Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, April 11, 1823
Here Jefferson explicitly denying the trinity:
Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity. It is the mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus.” -Thomas Jefferson, letter to Francis Adrian Van der Kemp, 30 July, 1816
The following excludes Ben Franklin
“You desire to know something of my religion. It is the first time I have been questioned upon it. But I cannot take your curiosity amiss, and shall endeavour in a few words to gratify it. Here is my creed. I believe in one God, Creator of the Universe. That He governs it by His providence. That He ought to be worshipped. That the most acceptable service we render Him is doing good to His other children. That the soul of man is immortal, and will be treated with justice in another life respecting its conduct in this. These I take to be the fundamental principles of all sound religion, and I regard them as you do in whatever sect I meet with them.
“As to Jesus of Nazareth, my opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the system of Morals and his Religion, as he left them to us, the best the World ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupt changes, and I have, with most of the present Dissenters in England, some doubts as to his divinity; though it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the Truth with less trouble. I see no harm, however, in its being believed, if that belief has the good consequence, as probably it has, of making his doctrines more respected and better observed; especially as I do not perceive that the Supreme takes it amiss, by distinguishing the unbelievers in His government of the world with any particular marks of His displeasure.
“I shall only add, respecting myself, that, having experienced the goodness of that Being in conducting me prosperously through a long life, I have no doubt of its continuance in the next, without the smallest conceit of meriting it… I confide that you will not expose me to criticism and censure by publishing any part of this communication to you. I have ever let others enjoy their religious sentiments, without reflecting on them for those that appeared to me unsupportable and even absurd. All sects here, and we have a great variety, have experienced my good will in assisting them with subscriptions for building their new places of worship; and, as I never opposed any of their doctrines, I hope to go out of the world in peace with them all. -Benjamin Franklin, letter to Ezra Stiles, President of Yale, shortly before his death
“Some volumes against Deism fell into my hands. They were said to be the substance of sermons preached at Boyle’s Lecture. It happened that they produced on me an effect precisely the reverse of what was intended by the writers; for the arguments of the Deists, which were cited in order to be refuted, appealed to me much more forcibly than the refutation itself. In a word, I soon became a thorough Deist” -Ben Franklin Autobiography
The following excludes John Adams:
This is from an exchange concerning the doctrine of the Trinity between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. Jefferson wrote on August 22, 1813 that:
“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.”
John Adams affirmed the same views regarding the Trinity in his reply of September 14, 1813:
DEAR SIR,—I owe you a thousand thanks for your favor of August 22d and its enclosures, and for Dr. Priestley’s doctrines of Heathen Philosophy compared with those of Revelation. Your letter to Dr. Rush and the syllabus, I return enclosed with this according to your injunctions, though with great reluctance. May I beg a copy of both?
They will do you no harm; me and others much good. I hope you will pursue your plan, for I am confident you will produce a work much more valuable than Priestley’s, though that is curious, and considering the expiring powers with which it was written, admirable. The bill in Parliament for the relief of Anti-Trinitarians, is a great event, and will form an epoch in ecclesiastical history. The motion was made by my friend Smith, of Clapham, a friend of the Belshams.
I should be very happy to hear that the bill is passed.The human understanding is a revelation from its Maker which can never be disputed or doubted. There can be no scepticism, Pyrrhonism, or incredulity, or infidelity, here. No prophecies, no miracles are necessary to prove the celestial communication. This revelation has made it certain that two and one make three, and that one is not three nor can three be one. We can never be so certain of any prophecy, or the fulfillment of any prophecy, or of any miracle, or the design of any miracle, as we are from the revelation of nature, i. e., Nature’s God, that two and two are equal to four.
Miracles or prophecies might frighten us out of our wits; might scare us to death; might induce us to lie, to say that we believe that two and two make five. But we should not believe it. We should know the contrary. Had you and I been forty days with Moses on Mount Sinai, and been admitted to behold the divine Shekinah, and there told that one was three and three one, we might not have had courage to deny it, but we could not have believed it.
Adams clearly rejects the idea of a trinitarian deity.
George Washington
While anti-Christian statements will not be found while rummaging through the writings of George Washington as with other founders, my adversaries will be even more hard-pressed in producing statements in the affirmative that would allow Washington to pass the above religious test. Washington never mentions Jesus in any of his public or private writings. Washington held his religious sentiments close to his chest, and rarely mentioned religion. The question then remains, why would he be so silent concerning his religious belief if he were a Christian? Regardless, Washington cannot be pulled under the Christian tent. That’s correct: Not even George Washington, the “Father of America,” can be shown to have subscribe to the basic tenets of Christianity. Washington does not pass this simple religious test!
As far as our founders basing our governmental system on the Bible, allow me to offer this:
Treaty of Tripoli – Authored by American diplomat Joel Barlow in 1796, sent to the floor of the Senate, June 7, 1797, where it was read aloud in its entirety and unanimously approved, and then signed by John Adams.
Art. 11. As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.
From Jefferson we have the following concerning Christianity and common law:
Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law.
-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Dr. Thomas Cooper, February 10, 1814
The challenge to my adversaries is to provide an equivalent document that makes an explicit claim that we are a Christian nation.
Here’s a far more explicit statement of faith given by Hitler, than was ever uttered by any of the above founding fathers.:
“My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God’s truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. To-day, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice… And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people.” -Adolf Hitler
(Speech on 12 April 1922 (Norman H. Baynes, ed. The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922-August 1939, Vol. 1 of 2, pp. 19-20, Oxford University Press, 1942)