Adherents.com: Religion of the Founding Fathers of America

[Battlehymn Republic]

Stats here, rather surprising.
I'm not going to claim anything as insipid as "zOmG! tEh us i5 s X'iaN naTiOn1!", but doesn't this cast doubt with the popular idea that most of the Founding Fathers were freethinking, cool and froody, Deist types?

I think it's more likely that many of them, as students of the Enlightenment and such ideals, were less religious than their constituents, but only a few memorable FF's like Jefferson and Franklin were outright disbelievers of religion as the Bible had it.

My utter apologies if this link has been posted before.

[Covenant]

You shouldn't be suprised. The vast majority of nonreligious people still claim to believe in God or attend services, either by habit or social and familial obligation, and politicians and preachers are two of the groups most noted for their capacity for doubletalk. That some of the Founding Fathers were both certainly does not suprise me either.

Obviously, America was not founded as a Christian nation, or the primary rockstars of the time would have been unwelcome. What's most interesting are that the well known founding fathers are the ones with the most debatable faith. Even the language was incredibly light on any direct, literal references to a Christian God in any sense, and I hardly think you can claim that Jefferson was just such a good writer they couldn't find anyone else, so they had to accept his Athiest Hippy literature and write their names on it.

They sound no more religious to me than Einstein, and the framers most responsible for giving us our perception of who the Founding Fathers were have such a low esteem of miracles and the like that I think by any modern day terms they would be considered dangerously athiestic.

So while it can be argued that many of the people who were involved in forming the country were Christians, the most potent symbols of that group are hardly Christian Soldiers, nor was the country they founded intended in any way to represent the religious beliefs of any group. And indeed, it seems as if they wanted to make every free man in the country able to remove himself from religion if possible.

I don't think you need to amend your perception, just be sure to make it clear who you're talking about, and what you're talking about in particular, when making sweeping comments, and they can remain froody Deists.

[Covenant]

Note, I meant Nonreligious in the sense that they're picking and choosing from the trendy ideas of the age, the bits of scripture they like, and their own personal feelings. Claiming to believe in a higher power, but never really acting on it, is religious in only the broadest terms. I wouldn't call those the types of people the ones to found a theocracy.

[Haruko]

Deism influenced most of the founders to a notable degree, I believe, and it shows in the only vague references in the Declaration, the godlessness and secularism of the Constitution, their private correspondence (of which Ed Buckner provides a great, well sourced list of at The Secular Web), and accomplishments lesser known to the general public, such as that religious freedom bill that was passed in Virginia before the Constitution, and which influenced it greatly.

Someone might look at that site and say, "Aha! Christians!!!!" But that's too simplistic. As I noted, most of them were influenced notably by Deism. They were influenced greatly by the Enlightenment principles, as such proofs I mentioned attest to. A great many Christians would look upon so many of the founders today and think them heretics/not "True Christians", and even atheistic.

Two orthodox Christian founders I recall are John Jay and Samuel Adams.

[Darth Wong]

A lot of people believe they can disprove the idea that the Founding Fathers were secularists by showing that they believed in God. What they generally fail to realize is that those two statements do not actually contradict each other.

Some of the Founding Fathers were outright deists or perhaps even atheists, but the majority were most likely Christian. Of course, the majority were also slave owners and the original Constitution had neither freedom of speech or freedom of religion in it, thus necessitating an amendment to add these ideas after the fact. But the most salient point is not whether they believed in God themselves, but whether they believed government and religion should be intertwined.

[Covenant]

A lot of people believe they can disprove the idea that the Founding Fathers were secularists by showing that they believed in God. What they generally fail to realize is that those two statements do not actually contradict each other.

Some of the Founding Fathers were outright deists or perhaps even atheists, but the majority were most likely Christian. Of course, the majority were also slave owners and the original Constitution had neither freedom of speech or freedom of religion in it, thus necessitating an amendment to add these ideas after the fact. But the most salient point is not whether they believed in God themselves, but whether they believed government and religion should be intertwined.

And this is often the most confusing thing about the Constitution. It was designed as a roadmap for setting up a Government, but not as some kind of holy scripture--in a literal or figurative sense. The religiosity of the men who wrote the document had nothing to do with their intent for the country, especially since many of those vocal members hoped that religion would either die and cease to be, or appear as some sort of life-affirming humanist Unitarian type of religion.

The greatest blow to any non-secular member of American history was allowing the modern Evangelicals to co-opt the name Christian for their own movement. Calling them Christians in a modern sense is like elephants and mice the same sort of thing just because they're both mammals.

[Haruko]

The fact of the matter is, the Founders had every chance to make this a Christian theocracy, or, at least, explicitly Christian to some degree, but they didn't, instead opting for a secular, godless Constitution. This alone stands as a huge obstacle to the view that this nation was established by a bunch of pious men speaking in tongues and who believed such things as a nation being better if run by the laws of scripture, rather than the laws of reason.

The Founders were men of the time of Enlightenment, and so many, if not the overwhelming or complete amount, went to universities, where they were most susceptible to the ideals this time spread and popularized.

[Haruko]

The Founders were men of the time of Enlightenment, and so many, if not the overwhelming or complete amount, went to universities, where they were most susceptible to the ideals this time spread and popularized.

One need only take a look at the Founders' family members' beliefs to see the glaring difference between them. On that note, I recommend a scholarly book on the matter I recently read title The Faiths of the Founding Fathers by David L. Holmes. As if the info about him wasn't enough to convince me to at least give his book a go, he also got the recommendation of Richard Carrier, an atheist who works at The Secular Web and has published a lot of great work on the subject of religion and atheism.