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More,

The Founding

Fathers Were Not Christians
by Steven Morris, in Free Inquiry, Fall, 1995

Also see Deism Links Page



"The Christian right is trying to rewrite the history of the United States as part of its campaign to force

its religion on others. They try to depict the founding fathers as pious Christians who wanted the United States to

be a Christian nation, with laws that favored Christians and Christianity.

This is patently untrue. The

early presidents and patriots were generally Deists or Unitarians, believing in some form of impersonal Providence

but rejecting the divinity of Jesus and the absurdities of the Old and New testaments.

Thomas Paine was a

pamphleteer whose manifestos encouraged the faltering spirits of the country and aided materially in winning the war

of Independence:
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...Each of those churches

accuse the other of unbelief; and for my own part, I disbelieve them all."
From:
The Age of Reason by Thomas

Paine, pp. 8,9 (Republished 1984, Prometheus Books, Buffalo, NY)



George Washington, the first

president of the United States, never declared himself a Christian according to contemporary reports or in any of

his voluminous correspondence. Washington Championed the cause of freedom from religious intolerance and compulsion.

When John Murray (a universalist who denied the existence of hell) was invited to become an army chaplain, the other

chaplains petitioned Washington for his dismissal. Instead, Washington gave him the appointment. On his deathbed,

Washinton uttered no words of a religious nature and did not call for a clergyman to be in attendance.
From:


George Washington and Religion by Paul F. Boller Jr., pp. 16, 87, 88, 108, 113, 121, 127 (1963, Southern

Methodist University Press, Dallas, TX)


John Adams, the country's second president, was drawn to the

study of law but faced pressure from his father to become a clergyman. He wrote that he found among the lawyers

'noble and gallant achievments" but among the clergy, the "pretended sanctity of some absolute dunces". Late in

life he wrote: "Twenty times in the course of my late reading, have I been upon the point of breaking out, "This

would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!"

It was during Adam's

administration that the Senate ratified the Treaty of Peace and Friendship, which states in Article XI that "the

government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion."
From:
The

Character of John Adams by Peter Shaw, pp. 17 (1976, North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC) Quoting a letter by JA

to Charles Cushing Oct 19, 1756, and John Adams, A Biography in his Own Words, edited by James Peabody, p. 403

(1973, Newsweek, New York NY) Quoting letter by JA to Jefferson April 19, 1817, and in reference to the treaty,

Thomas Jefferson, Passionate Pilgrim by Alf Mapp Jr., pp. 311 (1991, Madison Books, Lanham, MD) quoting letter by TJ

to Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse, June, 1814.


Thomas Jefferson, third president and author of the Declaration

of Independence, said:"I trust that there is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die a

Unitarian." He referred to the Revelation of St. John as "the ravings of a maniac" and wrote:
The Christian

priesthood, finding the doctrines of Christ levelled to every understanding and too plain to need explanation, saw,

in the mysticisms of Plato, materials with which they might build up an artificial system which might, from its

indistinctness, admit everlasting controversy, give employment for their order, and introduce it to profit, power,

and pre-eminence. The doctrines which flowed from the lips of Jesus himself are within the comprehension of a child;

but thousands of volumes have not yet explained the Platonisms engrafted on them: and for this obvious reason that

nonsense can never be explained."
From:
Thomas Jefferson, an Intimate History by Fawn M. Brodie, p. 453

(1974, W.W) Norton and Co. Inc. New York, NY) Quoting a letter by TJ to Alexander Smyth Jan 17, 1825, and Thomas

Jefferson, Passionate Pilgrim by Alf Mapp Jr., pp. 246 (1991, Madison Books, Lanham, MD) quoting letter by TJ to

John Adams, July 5, 1814.

James Madison, fourth president and father of the Constitution, was not religious

in any conventional sense. "Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble

enterprise."
"During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity 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."
From:
The Madisons by Virginia Moore, P. 43 (1979,

McGraw-Hill Co. New York, NY) quoting a letter by JM to William Bradford April 1, 1774, and James Madison, A

Biography in his Own Words, edited by Joseph Gardner, p. 93, (1974, Newsweek, New York, NY) Quoting Memorial and

Remonstrance against Religious Assessments by JM, June 1785.

Ethan Allen, whose capture of Fort Ticonderoga

while commanding the Green Mountain Boys helped inspire Congress and the country to pursue the War of Independence,

said, "That Jesus Christ was not God is evidence from his own words." In the same book, Allen noted that he was

generally "denominated a Deist, the reality of which I never disputed, being conscious that I am no Christian." When

Allen married Fanny Buchanan, he stopped his own wedding ceremony when the judge asked him if he promised "to live

with Fanny Buchanan agreeable to the laws of God." Allen refused to answer until the judge agreed that the God

referred to was the God of Nature, and the laws those "written in the great book of nature."
From:
Religion

of the American Enlightenment by G. Adolph Koch, p. 40 (1968, Thomas Crowell Co., New York, NY.) quoting preface and

p. 352 of Reason, the Only Oracle of Man and A Sense of History compiled by American Heritage Press Inc., p. 103

(1985, American Heritage Press, Inc., New York, NY.)



Benjamin Franklin, delegate to the Continental

Congress and the Constitutional Convention, said:
As to Jesus of Nazareth, my Opinion of whom you particularly

desire, I think the System of Morals and his Religion...has received various corrupting Changes, and I have, with

most of the present dissenters in England, some doubts as to his Divinity; tho' it is a question I do not dogmatize

upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an opportunity

of knowing the Truth with less trouble." He died a month later, and historians consider him, like so many great

Americans of his time, to be a Deist, not a Christian.
From:
Benjamin Franklin, A Biography in his Own

Words, edited by Thomas Fleming, p. 404, (1972, Newsweek, New York, NY) quoting letter by BF to Exra Stiles March 9,

1970.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The words

"In God We Trust" were not consistently on all U.S. currency until 1956, during the McCarthy witch hunts.

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In

a sermon of October 1831, Episcopalian minister Bird Wilson said,

Among all of our Presidents, from

Washington downward, not one was a professor of religion, at least not of more than Unitarianism.

The Bible?

Here is what our Founding Fathers wrote about Bible-based Christianity:

Thomas Jefferson:

I have

examined all the known superstitions of the world, and I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity

one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology. Millions of innocent men, women and

children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned. What has been the

effect of this coercion? To make one half the world fools and the other half hypocrites; to support roguery and

error all over the earth.
SIX HISTORIC AMERICANS,
by John E. Remsburg, letter to William Short
Jefferson

again:
Christianity...(has become) the most perverted system that ever shone on man. ...Rogueries, absurdities

and untruths were perpetrated upon the teachings of Jesus by a large band of dupes and importers led by Paul, the

first great corrupter of the teaching of Jesus.
More Jefferson:
The clergy converted the simple teachings of

Jesus into an engine for enslaving mankind and adulterated by artificial constructions into a contrivance to filch

wealth and power to themselves...these clergy, in fact, constitute the real Anti-Christ.
Jefferson's word for

the Bible?
Dunghill.
John Adams:
Where do we find a precept in the Bible for Creeds, Confessions,

Doctrines and Oaths, and whole carloads of other trumpery that we find religion encumbered with in these

days?
Also Adams:
The doctrine of the divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity.
Adams

signed the Treaty of Tripoli. Article 11 states:
The Government of the United States is not in any sense founded

on the Christian religion.
Here's Thomas Paine:
I would not dare to so dishonor my Creator God by attaching

His name to that book (the Bible).

Among the most detestable villains in history, you could not find one

worse than Moses. Here is an order, attributed to 'God' to butcher the boys, to massacre the mothers and to

debauch and rape the daughters. I would not dare so dishonor my Creator's name by (attaching) it to this filthy

book (the Bible).

It is the duty of every true Deist to vindicate the moral justice of God against the evils

of the Bible.

Accustom a people to believe that priests and clergy can forgive sins...and you will have sins

in abundance.

The Christian church has set up a religion of pomp and revenue in pretended imitation of a

person (Jesus) who lived a life of poverty.

Finally let's hear from James Madison:

What influence in

fact have Christian ecclesiastical establishments had on civil society? In many instances they have been upholding

the thrones of political tyranny. In no instance have they been seen as the guardians of the liberties of the

people. Rulers who wished to subvert the public liberty have found in the clergy convenient auxiliaries. A just

government, instituted to secure and perpetuate liberty, does not need the clergy.

Madison objected to

state-supported chaplains in Congress and to the exemption of churches from taxation. He wrote:

Religion and

government will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.

These founding fathers were a

reflection of the American population. Having escaped from the state-established religions of Europe, only 7% of the

people in the 13 colonies belonged to a church when the Declaration of Independence was signed.

Among those

who confuse Christianity with the founding of America, the rise of conservative Baptists is one of the more

interesting developments. The Baptists believed God's authority came from the people, not the priesthood, and they

had been persecuted for this belief. It was they—the Baptists—who were instrumental in securing the separation of

church and state. They knew you can not have a "one-way wall" that lets religion into government but that does not

let it out. They knew no religion is capable of handling political power without becoming corrupted by it. And,

perhaps, they knew it was Christ himself who first proposed the separation of church and state: Give unto Caesar

that which is Caesar's and unto the Lord that which is the Lord's.

In the last five years the Baptists have

been taken over by a fundamentalist faction that insists authority comes from the Bible and that the individual must

accept the interpretation of the Bible from a higher authority. These usurpers of the Baptist faith are those who

insist they should meddle in the affairs of the government and it is they who insist the government should meddle in

the beliefs of individuals.

The price of Liberty is constant vigilance. Religious fundamentalism and zealous

patriotism have always been the forces which require the greatest attention.