I got in a fight with someone about whether or not America’s founders were Christian, in the 3 courses I’ve had on American History, all my professors have said that the founders were either Deists, Atheists, Agnostics or Unitarians. But apparently in the American South they still teach that they were Christians….kind of like the Ku Klux Klan were the heroes in post civil-war reconstruction.
“Religious controversies are always productive of more acrimony and irreconcilable hatreds than those which spring from any other cause. Of all the animosities which have existed among mankind, those which are caused by the difference of sentiments in religion appear to be the most inveterate and distressing, and ought most to be depreciated. I was in hopes that the enlightened and liberal policy, which has marked the present age, would at least have reconciled Christians of every denomination so far that we should never again see the religious disputes carried to such a pitch as to endanger the peace of society.” – letter to Edward Newenham, 1792
Historian Barry Schwartz writes: “George Washington’s practice of Christianity was limited and superficial because he was not himself a Christian… He repeatedly declined the church’s sacraments. Never did he take communion, and when his wife, Martha, did, he waited for her outside the sanctuary… Even on his deathbed, Washington asked for no ritual, uttered no prayer to Christ, and expressed no wish to be attended by His representative.” [New York Press, 1987, pp. 174-175]
Thomas Jefferson:
“The whole history of these books [the Gospels] is so defective and doubtful that it seems vain to attempt minute enquiry into it: and such tricks have been played with their text, and with the texts of other books relating to them, that we have a right, from that cause, to entertain much doubt what parts of them are genuine. In the New Testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts, as to pick out diamonds from dunghills.” -Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, January 24, 1814
“Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law.” -Thomas Jefferson, letter to Dr. Thomas Cooper, February 10, 1814
“As I understand the Christian religion, it was, and is, a revelation. But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed?”-letter to F.A. Van der Kamp, Dec. 27, 1816
ose churches accuse the other of unbelief; and for my own part, I disbelieve them all.”
1796 Treaty of Tripoly written under George Washington and signed under John Adams states that America was “in no sense founded on the Christian religion”
“Among all of our Presidents, from Washington downward, not one was a professor of religion, at least not of more than Unitarianism.”
“The Bible is not my book, nor Christianity my profession”
