Religion of the Founding Fathers

by Beryl Lawson

July 3, 2011

The celebration  of Independence Day brings forth many nostalgic ideas about our founding, the people who made it possible and questions as to how we are doing today. How well are we keeping to the ideals of those who started it all, what might we change of those ideals, do they need changing, and how can these ideals carry us through the difficult times ahead.

The current attack on our country from the “Religious right” comes in the form of a statement that they want this country to “return to the Christian principles on which it was founded.”  However, a little research into American history will show that that statement is not true.”

The men responsible for the building the foundation of the United States had little use for Christianity . They were men of the Enlightenment. They were Deists who did not believe that the bible was true.

Most of the founders were deists, which is to say they thought the universe had a creator, but that he, she or it does not concern itself with the daily lives of humans and does not directly communicate with humans, either by revelation or sacred books

They spoke often of God (Nature’s god or the God of Nature as mentioned in the Declaration. But this was not the god of the bible. They often praised the benevolent teachings of a man called Jesus but flatly denied his divinity.

The Constitution has only two mentions of religion and both times in negative terms. First amendment, congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion  …  and no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.

Jefferson-letter in 1802: “ I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the g=free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between church and State.”

The founders were students of the European enlightenment. Episcopal minister Bird Wilson protested in Oct 1831” Among all our presidents from Washington downward, not one was a professor of religion, at least not of more than Unitarianism.” the attitude was one of enlightened reason, tolerance and free thought.

The Treaty of Tripoli of 1796, written during Washington’s administration and ratified in the term of John Adams states “As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion, no pretext arising from religions opinions shall ever produce and interruption of the harmony existing between any Mahometan nation and the United States.”

Quotes

James Madison

“It may not be easy, in every possible case, to trace the line of separation between the rights of religion and the Civil authority with such distinctness as to avoid collisions and doubts on unessential points. The tendency to usurpation on one side or the other, or to a corrupting coalition or alliance between them, will be best guarded against. by an entire abstinence of the Gov’t from inference in any way whatsoever, beyond the necessity of preserving public order, and protecting each sect against. trespasses on its legal rights by others.” James Madison, “James Madison on Religious Liberty”,

“The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries.” -1803 letter objecting use of government. land for churches

John Adams

“The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity. Nowhere in the Gospels do we find a precept for Creeds, Confessions, Oaths, Doctrines, and whole cartloads of other foolish trumpery that we find in Christianity.” “The question before the human race is, whether the God of Nature shall govern the world by his own laws, or whether priests and kings shall rule it by fictitious miracles?” “God is an essence that we know nothing of. Until this awful blasphemy is got rid of, there will never be any liberal science in the world.” “This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it.” . .

Thomas Jefferson

“In every country and every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot … they have perverted the purest religion ever preached to man into mystery and jargon, unintelligible to all mankind, and therefore the safer engine for their purpose.” – to Horatio Spafford, March 17, 1814 “Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced an inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth.” – “Notes on Virginia” “Shake off all the fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear. – letter to Peter Carr, Aug. 10, 1787

“History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance, of which their political as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purpose.” – to Baron von Humboldt, 1813 . “On the dogmas of religion, as distinguished from moral principles, all mankind, from the beginning of the world to this day, have been quarreling, fighting, burning and torturing one another, for abstractions unintelligible to themselves and to all others, and absolutely beyond the comprehension of the human mind.” – to Carey, 1816

“The doctrines of Jesus are simple, and tend all to the happiness of man. But compare with these the demoralizing dogmas of Calvin. 1. That there are three Gods. 2. That good works, or the love of our neighbor, is nothing. 3. That faith is every thing, and the more incomprehensible the proposition, the more merit the faith. 4. That reason in religion is of unlawful use. 5. That God, from the beginning, elected certain individuals to be saved, and certain others to be damned; and that no crimes of the former can damn them; no virtues of the latter save.” – to Benjamin Waterhouse, Jun. 26, 1822 “I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature.” “It has been fifty and sixty years since I read the Apocalypse, and then I considered it merely the ravings of a maniac.” “The truth is, that the greatest enemies of the doctrine of Jesus are those, calling themselves the expositors of them, who have perverted them to the structure of a system of fancy absolutely incomprehensible, and without any foundation in his genuine words. And the day will come, when the mystical generation [birth] of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation [birth] of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.” – to John Adams, Apr. 11, 1823 . “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” . Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God,that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between church and State.” -letter to Danbury Baptist Association, CT “The Complete Jefferson” by Saul K. Padover, pp 518-519

Say nothing of my religion. It is known to God and myself alone. Its evidence before the world is to be sought in my life: if it has been honest and dutiful to society the religion which has regulated it cannot be a bad one.

George Washington The father of this country was very private about his beliefs, but it is widely considered that he was a Deist like his colleagues. He was a freemason.

The Rev. Dr. Wilson, who was almost a contemporary of our earlier statesmen and presidents, and who thoroughly investigated the subject of their religious beliefs, in his sermon already mentioned affirmed that the founders of our nation were nearly all Infidels, and that of the presidents who had thus far been elected — George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, and Andrew Jackson — not one had professed a belief in Christianity. From this sermon I quote the following: “When the war was over and the victory over our enemies won, and the blessings and happiness of liberty and peace were secured, the Constitution was framed and God was neglected. He was not merely forgotten. He was absolutely voted out of the Constitution. The proceedings, as published by Thompson, the secretary, and the history of the day, show that the question was gravely debated whether God should be in the Constitution or not, and, after a solemn debate he was deliberately voted out of it. … There is not only in the theory of our government no recognition of God’s laws and sovereignty, but its practical operation, its administration, has been conformable to its theory. Those who have been called to administer the government have not been men making any public profession of Christianity. … Washington was a man of valor and wisdom. He was esteemed by the whole world as a great and good man; but he was not a professing Christian.”

“When the Congress sat in Philadelphia, President Washington attended the Episcopal church. The rector, Dr. Abercrombie, told me that on the days when the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper was to be administered, Washington’s custom was to rise just before the ceremony commenced, and walk out of church. This became a subject of remark in the congregation, as setting a bad example. At length the Doctor undertook to speak of it, with a direct allusion to the President. Washington was heard afterwards to remark that this was the first time a clergyman had thus preached to him, and he should henceforth neither trouble the Doctor nor his congregation on such occasions; and ever after that, upon communion days, he ‘absented himself altogether from the church.’

Franklin “I think vital religion has always suffered when orthodoxy is more regarded than virtue. The scriptures assure me that at the last day we shall not be examined on what we thought but what we did.” – letter to his father, 1738 “. . . Some books against Deism fell into my hands. . . It happened that they wrought an effect on my quite contrary to what was intended by them; for the arguments of the Deists, which were quoted to be refuted, appeared to me much stronger than the refutations; in short, I soon became a thorough Deist.” . “The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason.” -in Poor Richard’s Almanac “When a religion is good, I conceive it will support itself; and when it does not support itself so that its professors are obliged to call for the help of the civil power, ’tis a sign, I apprehend, of its “In the affairs of the world, men are saved, not by faith, but by the lack of it.”

Thomas Paine

John Adams said: Without the pen of Paine, the sword of Washington would have been wielded in vain.

Quote from “Age of Reason” “I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life. I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy. But, lest it should be supposed that I believe in many other things in addition to these, I shall, in the progress of this work, declare the things I do not believe, and my reasons for not believing them. 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. My own mind is my own church.

Nothing that is here said can apply, even with the most distant disrespect, to the real character of Jesus Christ. He was a virtuous and an amiable man. The morality that he preached and practiced was of the most benevolent kind; and though similar systems of morality had been preached by Confucius, and by some of the Greek philosophers, many years before; by the Quakers since; and by many good men in all ages, it has not been exceeded by any. Jesus Christ wrote no account of himself, of his birth, parentage, or any thing else; not a line of what is called the New Testament is of his own writing. The history of him is altogether the work of other people; and as to the account given of his resurrection and ascension, it was the necessary counterpart to the story of his birth. His historians having brought him into the world in a supernatural manner, were obliged to take him out again in the same manner, or the first part of the story must have fallen to the ground.

If I owe a person money, and cannot pay him, and he threatens to put me in prison, another person can take the debt upon himself, and pay it for me; but if I have committed a crime, every circumstance of the case is changed; moral Justice cannot take the innocent for the guilty, even if the innocent would offer itself. To suppose Justice to do this, is to destroy the principle of its existence, which is the thing itself; it is then no longer Justice, it is indiscriminate revenge. This single reflection will show, that the doctrine of redemption is founded on a mere pecuniary idea corresponding to that of a debt which another person might pay; and as this pecuniary idea corresponds again with the system of second redemption, obtained through the means of money given to the Church for pardons, the probability is that the same persons fabricated both the one and the other of those theories; and that, in truth there is no such thing as redemption — that it is fabulous, and that man stands in the same relative condition with his Maker as he ever did stand since man existed, and that it is his greatest consolation to think so.

Let him believe this, and he will live more consistently and morally than by any other system; it is by his being taught to contemplate himself as an outlaw, as an outcast, as a beggar, as a mumper, as one thrown, as it were, on a dunghill at an immense distance from his Creator, and who must make his approaches by creeping and cringing to intermediate beings, that he conceives either a contemptuous disregard for everything under the name of religion, or becomes indifferent, or turns what he calls devout. In the latter case, he consumes his life in grief, or the affectation of it; his prayers are reproaches; his humility is ingratitude; he calls himself a worm, and the fertile earth a dunghill; and all the blessings of life by the thankless name of vanities; he despises the choicest gift of God to man, the GIFT OF REASON; and having endeavored to force upon himself the belief of a system against which reason revolts, he ungratefully calls it human reason, as if man could give reason to himself. Yet, with all this strange appearance of humility and this contempt for human reason, he ventures into the boldest presumptions; he finds fault with everything; his selfishness is never satisfied; his ingratitude is never at an end. He takes on himself to direct the Almighty what to do, even in the government of the universe; he prays dictatorially; when it is sunshine, he prays for rain, and when it is rain, he prays for sunshine; he follows the same idea in everything that he prays for; for what is the amount of all his prayers but an attempt to make the Almighty change his mind, and act otherwise than he does? It is as if he were to say: Thou knowest not so well as I. But some, perhaps, will say: Are we to have no word of God — no revelation? I answer, Yes; there is a word of God; there is a revelation. THE WORD OF GOD IS THE CREATION WE BEHOLD and it is in this word, which no human invention can counterfeit or alter, that God speaketh universally to man. Human language is local and changeable, and is therefore incapable of being used as the means of unchangeable and universal information. The idea that God sent Jesus Christ to publish, as they say, the glad tidings to all nations, from one end of the earth to the other, is consistent only with the ignorance of those who knew nothing of the extent of the world, and who believed, as those world-saviours believed, and continued to believe for several centuries (and that in contradiction to the discoveries of philosophers and the experience of navigators), that the earth was flat like a trencher, and that man might walk to the end of it. But how was Jesus Christ to make anything known to all nations? He could speak but one language which was Hebrew, and there are in the world several hundred languages. Scarcely any two nations speak the same language, or understand each other; and as to translations, every man who knows anything of languages knows that it is impossible to translate from one language to another, not only without losing a great part of the original, but frequently of mistaking the sense; and besides all this, the art of printing was wholly unknown at the time Christ lived. It is always necessary that the means that are to accomplish any end be equal to the accomplishment of that end, or the end cannot be accomplished. It is in this that the difference between finite and infinite power and wisdom discovers itself. Man frequently fails in accomplishing his ends, from a natural inability of the power to the purpose, and frequently from the want of wisdom to apply power properly. But it is impossible for infinite power and wisdom to fail as man faileth. The means it useth are always equal to the end; but human language, more especially as there is not an universal language, is incapable of being used as an universal means of unchangeable and uniform information, and therefore it is not the means that God useth in manifesting himself universally to man. It is only in the CREATION that all our ideas and conceptions of a word of God can unite. The Creation speaketh an universal language, independently of human speech or human language, multiplied and various as they may be. It is an ever-existing original, which every man can read. It cannot be forged; it cannot be counterfeited; it cannot be lost; it cannot be altered; it cannot be suppressed. It does not depend upon the will of man whether it shall be published or not; it publishes itself from one end of the earth to the other. It preaches to all nations and to all worlds; and this word of God reveals to man all that is necessary for man to know of God. Do we want to contemplate his power? We see it in the immensity of the Creation. Do we want to contemplate his wisdom? We see it in the unchangeable order by which the incomprehensible whole is governed! Do we want to contemplate his munificence? We see it in the abundance with which he fills the earth. Do we want to contemplate his mercy? We see it in his not withholding that abundance even from the unthankful. In fine, do we want to know what God is? Search not the book called the Scripture, which any human hand might make, but the Scripture called the Creation. The only idea man can affix to the name of God is that of a first cause, the cause of all things. And incomprehensible and difficult as it is for a man to conceive what a first cause is, he arrives at the belief of it from the tenfold greater difficulty of disbelieving it. It is difficult beyond description to conceive that space can have no end; but it is more difficult to conceive an end. It is difficult beyond the power of man to conceive an eternal duration of what we call time; but it is more impossible to conceive a time when there shall be no time. In like manner of reasoning, everything we behold carries in itself the internal evidence that it did not make itself Every man is an evidence to himself that he did not make himself; neither could his father make himself, nor his grandfather, nor any of his race; neither could any tree, plant, or animal make itself; and it is the conviction arising from this evidence that carries us on, as it were, by necessity to the belief of a first cause eternally existing, of a nature totally different to any material existence we know of, and by the power of which all things exist; and this first cause man calls God. It is only by the exercise of reason that man can discover God. Take away that reason, and he would be incapable of understanding anything; and, in this case, it would be just as consistent to read even the book called the Bible to a horse as to a man. How, then, is it that those people pretend to reject reason?”

These men  were Deists, held substantially the same theological opinions held by Paine. But, engrossed for the most part with other affairs, they found time to publish no “Age of Reason” to be a standing witness of their unbelief, and hence escaped the malicious shafts which the Author-Hero was doomed to receive

According to the church, every person has at some period in his life been forced to acknowledge the genuineness of her dogmas. The more conservative Freethinkers she would have us believe live devoted Christian lives, while into the dying lips of the more radical ones she puts a recantation. Thus with consummate coolness she informs us that Jefferson , Washington, and Franklin procured their entire religious wardrobe at the Orthodox clothing emporium, and that even Paine was obliged to order his shroud from this establishment. But these claims, unfounded as they are, must fall. These men were not believers. They were good and virtuous men, but not Christians. They were eminent and patriotic statesmen, but not “Christian statesmen.” They had unbounded faith in humanity, but reposed very little in “our particular superstition.” Morally and intellectually they were giants, and their large hearts and mighty brains yearned and grasped for something better, for a broader, holier faith than that professed by those around them. It would appear absurd for one to hold up the toys and garments of a child and say, “Behold the armor that Goliath wore!” and it is equally absurd for Christians to exhibit their dwarfish, senseless creeds and claim that these shrunken, threadbare robes were worn by the Fathers of our Republic.

To the realm of Freethought these characters belong. And they are not alone; they have illustrious company. Earth’s noblest sons and daughters — the brightest stars in the constellation of genius — those who have added most to the riches of science, and literature, and statesmanship, — Bruno, Spinoza, Galileo, and Descartes; Bacon and Newton; Humboldt and Darwin; Comte and Mill; Draper; Spencer, Tyndall, and Huxley; Haeckel and Helmholtz; Hume and Gibbon; Goethe and Schiller; Shakespeare, Pope, Byron, Burns, and Shelley; Rousseau, Voltaire, and Diderot; D’Alembert, Button, and Condorcet; Frederick and Bolingbroke; Volney; De Steel, Sand, Eliot, and Martineau; Strauss and Renan; Hugo. Carlyle, and Emerson; Lincoln and Sumner; Gambetta and Garibaldi; Bradlaugh and Castellar; our own loved Ingersoll — these were all disbelievers in the Orthodox faith — these have each borne the name of infidel, a word in which is concentrated all the hatred and scorn of Christendom. But these so-called Infidels have ever constituted the forlorn hope in the onward march of human progress, and this word, instead of a term of reproach, will become one of the grandest words in all the languages of men.

What can we, as UUs, do to stem the tide of belief that this is a Christian nation?  I offer this as a question and a challenge for us to think about and act upon.

The signers of the Declaration of Independence did not pledge to God but rather to each other their ‘lives, fortune and sacred honor.’ Can we, in our own way and in our own time, in the cause and for the country we love and believe in, do any less?