America’s founders espoused "theistic rationalism"...

The Founders and Faith: 

None of the Above

by Gary Scott Smith

The Religious Beliefs of America’s Founders: 

Reason, Revelation, Revolution, 

by Gregg L. Frazer

The religious views of America’s founders have been fiercely contested in the public arena for many years. The principal battle is between those who claim that most founders were devout Christians and those who assert that they were deists. This debate has important ramifications for arguments that the United States was founded as a distinctively Christian nation, or as an essentially secular one, and for how to interpret the First Amendment.

Into the fray has stepped Gregg L. Frazer, a professor of history and political studies at The Master’s College in Santa Clarita, California. InThe Religious Beliefs of America’s Founders: Reason, Revelation, Revolution, he argues that the nation’s most prominent founders—George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin—and key framers (of the Declaration and the Constitution)—Gouverneur Morris, James Wilson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton—were neither Christians nor deists.

Frazer aims to correct the “severely flawed” arguments of popularizers (primarily pastors, lawyers, and armchair historians) such as David Barton (The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You’ve Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson) who portray most of the founders as committed Christians, if not evangelical Protestants, and others, including Americans United for the Separation of Church and State spokesperson Barry Lynn and journalist Brooke Allen (Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers), who depict the founders as “rank secularists.”

The former group contends that most of the founders sought to create a thoroughly Christian nation, while the latter group portrays the founders as seeking to erect an absolute “wall of separation” between church and state (or even between religion and government by excluding all religious ideologies and principles from the public square).

Although a substantial group of founders were orthodox Christians—including Samuel Adams, John Witherspoon, John Jay, Elias Boudinot, John Hancock, Patrick Henry, Benjamin Rush, Roger Sherman, and Oliver Ellsworth—Frazer convincingly argues that the most renowned founders were not traditional Christians, strident secularists, or devoted deists.

Frazer shows that neither the Christian-America camp nor the strict separationists (which include many influential historians and political scientists, the American Civil Liberties Union, and People for the American Way) correctly understand the religious views of America’s leading founders. The partisan agendas of both groups discourage careful, dispassionate analysis of the evidence.

Frazer builds on the foundation laid by numerous historians and political scientists who show that the founders were deeply influenced by both Christianity and the Enlightenment. Convinced that labeling these key founders as Christian, deist, or secular is inaccurate, Frazer invents a new term—theistic rationalism—to describe their convictions. Theistic rationalism is a hybrid system that mixes “elements of natural religion, Christianity, and rationalism” and makes rationalism the dominant component. While these three elements usually complemented each other, reason played the decisive role when they conflicted on particular issues. Instead of employing reason to show that divine revelation was true, theistic rationalists “made reason the ultimate standard.”

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