David Barton

And Elias Boudinot, a President of Congress during the American Revolution, served as president of the “Society for Ameliorating the State of the Jews,” and made personal provision for bringing persecuted Jews to America. This tolerance for other faiths and religions, however, did not negate nor alter the fact that America was founded by Christians, on Christian principles. In fact, in 1854, following an extensive one-year investigation, the U. S. Congress succinctly declared: Had the people, during the Revolution, had a suspicion of any attempt to war against Christianity, that Revolution would have been strangled in its cradle. At the time of the adoption of the Constitution and the amendments, the universal sentiment was that Christianity should be encouraged, but not any one [denomination]. . . . In this age there can be no substitute for Christianity. . . . That was the religion of the founders of the republic, and they expected it to remain the religion of their descendents.

Half-a-century later in 1892, the U. S. Supreme Court also conducted a thorough review of American history. After citing more than sixty historical precedents, the Court concluded: There is no dissonance in these declarations. There is a universal language pervading them all, having one meaning; they affirm and reaffirm that this is a religious nation. . . . this is a Christian nation.

But today’s pseudo-historians, not willing to let truth or historical fact stand in the way of their personal secularist convictions, proclaim just the opposite, asserting that neither our nation nor its leaders were influenced by Christianity. One article declares, “Our Founding Presidents Were Not Christians.” Another similarly announces “The Founding Fathers Were Not Christians” (notice the emphasis on the word “not”). Another proclaims that the “Signers of the Declaration were Enemies of Christ.” The L. A. Times heralds “America’s Unchristian Beginnings,” with an inset box declaring, “The founding fathers: Most, despite the preachings of our pious right, were deists who rejected the divinity of Jesus.”

According to these and many other writers, our Founding Fathers were a collective group of atheists, agnostics, and deists; they didn’t believe in Jesus; they weren’t Christians. And since our Founders were allegedly nothing more than atheists, agnostics, and deists, the title of a current university textbook seems to make complete sense: The Godless Constitution.

Many Americans today would not disagree with these characterizations. After all, in the painting of the signers of the Declaration, who are the two Founders that most Americans can immediately recognize? Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, of course! But can they identify which one in the picture is Samuel Huntington – or Robert Livingston, George Clinton, Robert Morris, Stephen Hopkins, Richard Henry Lee, George Read, Roger Sherman, Elbridge Gerry, or the others? Americans seem to know nothing about these other signers.

We have been trained to recognize the two “least religious” Founders, Franklin and Jefferson. While we don’t know the others, we nevertheless are told that they were just like Franklin and Jefferson. However, in defense of Franklin and Jefferson, while they may have been the two “least religious” Founders, “least” is a comparative term; even they would be much more religious than most “religious” individuals today.

After all, Benjamin Franklin not only drafted a statewide prayer proclamation for his own State of Pennsylvania but he also recommended Christianity in the State’s public schools and worked to raise church attendance in the State. He also desired to start a colony in Ohio with the Rev. George Whitefield to “facilitate the introduction of pure religion among the heathen” in order to show the Indians “a better sample of Christians than they commonly see in our Indian traders.” He enthused, “In such an enterprise I could spend the remainder of life with pleasure, and I firmly believe God would bless us with success.” Franklin also made one of the nation’s most forceful defenses of religion when it was attacked by Thomas Paine, the author of the infamous Age of Reason. And it was Franklin – citing numerous Bible verses to prove his point – who called for the establishment of chaplains and daily prayer at the Constitutional Convention. These are the documented actions of one of the “least religious” Founding Fathers.

And then there is Thomas Jefferson. Not only did he recommend that the Great Seal of the United States depict a Bible story and include the word “God” in the national motto but President Jefferson also negotiated a federal treaty with the Kaskaskia Indians in which he included direct federal funding to pay for Christian ministers to work with the Indians and for the building of a church in which the Indians could worship – and this treaty was ratified by the U. S. Senate! Furthermore, Jefferson closed presidential documents with the appellation “In the year of our Lord Christ,” thus invoking Jesus Christ into official government documents. And this is Thomas Jefferson – the other “least religious” Founder! Most Americans really don’t know that much even about the Founders they think they know best! But what of the other signers about whom most Americans know less? Of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration, over half were educated in schools established for the purpose of training ministers for the Gospel, and they received what today would be considered degrees from seminaries or Bible schools. Many of the Founders also served as ministers or were active in Christian service.

david barton david barton