Our Founders were Atheists
...and agnostics and deists.
Looking for a concise counter-argument to the annoying, fabricated assertion that our Founding Fathers were pious, God-fearing men? Read below…
I just wrote a piece on America’s original constitution, The Articles of Confederation, our confederal founding and decentralized original intent for Unherd. The reviews for my piece came in hard and fast: “florid pretentious piece of trash,” “prolix,” more difficult than Finnegans Wake. But defenders of America’s original intent have had to bear up under much worse, and in honor of our confederal founding I suggest you give it a try.
Now, our confederal origins are such a poorly taught history that “confederal” bears the red squiggly line of the typo here on Substack. In fact, the whole episode is America’s first hornswoggle: a class of creditors coercively swapping out a decentralized polity for a consolidated central government. Lucrative! In so doing they turned the American Revolution into a Reformation of English polity. They also removed religion from the law.
Citizens of Massachusetts were never supposed to be able to cast a federal vote that effected how Texans live. As a confederation, we were supposed to be a simultaneity of disparate polities and beliefs. In this paradoxical spirit, I want to show you how decentralized is my own mind. I am an anti-Federalist and consider the Federal “Founders” to be traitors. But I am also a patriot, and can’t stand to see our atheist “Founders” labeled as Christians. I am, yes, deeply proud of their secularism.
The anti-Federalists were the Christians; the Federalists were the anti-Christians. Enjoy.
In celebration of the 250th Anniversary of the founding of America, the Trump Administration and its supporters in the MAGA coalition have begun pushing a false history of America’s origins. Back in May, J.D. Vance, Tulsi Gabbard, Marco Rubio and others gave speeches at Rededicate 250, a government-organized Christian prayer rally where, amongst “rededications” of the United States to God, they propagated the spurious narrative that America and all of Western civilization were founded by pious Christians and based on Christian principles. Of course, the exact opposite is true: Western principles and America in particular were founded by religious skeptics in contradiction of Christianity.
For folks supposedly passionate about American history, they give the impression of not having read our founding documents. After all, the greatest counterargument that the Constitution is not a Christian document is the Constitution. The pious may search in vain for a single mention of God, Jesus Christ, Christianity or the foundations of a Christian politic within the document: there are none.
There are of course purposeful references to the concept of religion, namely the explicit forbiddance of religious faith or tests as requirements to hold public office. The only other mention is the First Amendment’s wall of separation between church and state, a principle that, far from being Christian in origin, is anti-Christian in origin, being as it is an explicit refutation of the then Christian practice of barbaric punitive violence between sects for practices of free speech. At the time of the Revolution, Christians in Europe were still burning each other alive and menacing scientists for looking through telescopes. (Christian violence is not quite in our distant past either: the last four decades furnish us with Christian atrocities in Lebanon in the early 80s, the terrorism of the IRA, the Christian genocide in Bosnia, and American bombings of abortion clinics.) This scourge of organized religion was not lost on the amendment’s non-Christian author, James Madison, who said, “Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprize and every expanded prospect.” Later in life, Madison’s religious skepticism fully evolved into, at the very least, agnosticism, writing of the Christian concept of God that the universe was “visibly destitute of those attributes.”
The Declaration of Independence, a poetic expression but not a governing document, does make scant reference to an intentionally vague universal “Creator,” but this is the non-theological “Supreme Being” of deism, not the Judeo-Christian God. This makes sense as it was written by a deist and fearless public scorner of Christianity, Thomas Jefferson. In the 18th century, before the discoveries of evolution and the big bang, deism was a halfway house for agnostics and anti-theists who had moved beyond religious skepticism but were yet without the scientific knowledge and modern confidence to posit a universe without some prime mover at work, or simply did not want to risk public affiliation with atheism for understandable self-protective reasons. The deistic “supreme being” was the prime mover or demiurge of the pre-Christian, secular Greek philosophers whose works the founders turned to when inventing our nation. Deists did not believe that this supreme being intervened in human life, nor did any theology describe cosmology with any truth or accuracy. They also did not believe in the divinity of Christ, and so cannot be referred to by the meaningless compound “Christian deists,” and certainly not by the term “Christian.”
Jefferson, who hoped “that the human mind will some day get back to the freedom it enjoyed 2000 years ago,” that is, the intellectual freedom before Christian governance caved in the principles of secular civilization in Rome, was famously scurrilous toward Christianity and religion in public. In private he was even more unequivocal, writing to friend Alexander Smyth about the Bible, “I do not consider them as revelations of the supreme being.” The Jefferson Bible was Jefferson’s defilement of the New Testament, removing every mention of God, miracle, and Christ’s divinity, winnowing it down simply to the ethical preachments of Christ. This personalized text was held in his Monticello library where it was outnumbered by works of pre-Christian philosophers such as Livy, Tacitus, Aristotle and Plato by orders of magnitude. Jefferson was accused, quite accurately by the Charlie Kirks of his day like the rabid Yale President Timothy Dwight, of being an “arch-infidel” (in the parlance of the time, an atheist) for statements such as “history, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government” and “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.”
In private, Jefferson speculated fairly conclusively that our first President George Washington was not a Christian. “I know that Gouverneur Morris [an atheist founder], who pretended to be in his [Washington’s] secrets and believed himself to be so, has often told me that General Washington believed no more in that system than he himself did.” Washington’s private life bears this out as well. As President, he refused to take communion at church, leaving before the services. Reprimanded for this by his Reverend James Abercrombie, Washington ceased attending church altogether, not wanting to set a “zealous example” to the nation. Abercrombie, as well as two other of Washington’s priests, concluded in terse, private correspondence that the man was not a Christian, but a “deist.” Washington’s last public address was written for him. Before delivering it, he removed and swapped all mention of Jesus Christ, Christianity and God with non-sectarian deistic terminology. When he died, Washington called for no father of the cloth to give him last rites.
To round off the founders on our money – whose pecuniary mottos of “In God we trust” were interlarded into our currency in the mid-20th century when our nation last played with Loyalty Oaths – we come to Benjamin Franklin. A genius of comical imposture and America’s first troll, Franklin is perhaps the easiest to identify as a non-Christian. Like Jefferson and Washington, the pious of the time like First Great Awakening found George Whitfield privately urged upon Franklin a conversion to Christianity. Even deists as irreligious as Dr. Joseph Priestly despaired of Franklin’s infidel soul, and John Adams explicitly identified Franklin as a man of no religion in his Paris diaries. Franklin’s Autobiography is in part a testimony of his intellectual journey away from Christianity and that doctrine of “revelation” of which he said it “had no weight with me.” He wrote that the pamphlets he read against deism as a young man convinced him of deism. He considered Christian doctrines “unintelligible, and others doubtful.”
After all, it was the establishment of Christianity as a polity in Rome that marked the collapse of a Western civilization on the cusp of the steam engine and Industrial Revolution. This ushered in the 500 year-period of the Dark Ages, when even the knowledge of how to build an arch was lost and child soldiers were sent into religious Crusades in Palestine. It was Christianity that burned and permanently destroyed thousands of secular works of the ancient world, leaving Renaissance and Enlightenment philosophers and our own founders with mostly the post-Socratic Greeks to reach toward when founding America, the pre-Socratics being laid to sectarian waste. Far from being the foundation of Western society, Christianity devoured its foundations. And now with oligarchs who own the data of every American like Peter Thiel spreading bizarre new visions of anti-Christs, Thiel-funded J.D. Vance claiming aliens are “demons” amid official UAP disclosure, and a Trump Administration full of false history, Christianity seems poised to collapse civilization all over again.
Given your prior essay on the Articles of Confederation in which you rightly satirized the Founding Fathers as a bunch of creditors worried about getting stiffed, I am surprised and kinda sadden to read this essay now praising them as a bunch of secular holy prophets of humanism. They were a bunch of tax evaders, bootleggers, privateers, black-marketeers, smugglers, slave traders and owners, and traitors before the law who would have been hanged if caught by the secular law you are admiring not by any church law. As with all humans with a will to power strong enough to want to construct a society in their image, they did what they did for their own sense of power and justice. It was successful because of the hypocritical and disingenuous use of Christianity and Christian hoi polloi for their usefulness and not in anyway because of a contradictory struggle against Christianity. Though you pretend not, it seems you may have an unacknowledged love of power and of the powerful yourself for which you search AI history to support instead of actually reading history. Western Civilization is founded upon Christianity. Without it, if humanity were still around which is an open question, it would live at best in an a real dark ages --- not a pretend propaganda one --- consisting of an endless cycle of anarchy to tyranny and back. Though Nietzschean posers pretend to want such cycles, in reality, they would be the slaves of such a world during their short lives to a miserable death.
The Roman Principate and Dominate had become a tyrannical oligarchy that was impoverishing the Western World that was rightly and luckily destroyed by Christianity. They had no industrial, technological, or any other revolution other than eternal exchanges of power by Nietzschean conquerors. Without Christianity, we would have joined the ranks of Asia, Africa, the East, and even the Americas ruled for millennia by warlords, tyrants, warring tribes, and of course emperors. There were no "dark" Dark Ages --- given capital letters by propagandists trying to revise history for their anti-religion motive. No historian in his right mind still uses the term "Dark Ages". The early Middles Ages were a period of social and political invention --- and even technical invention in such areas as farming and sailing that made possible the Age of Discovery. The development of a feudal system in which the Upper Class had contractual duties of protection to the Lower Classes that could be legally enforced by the Church (before the secular courts grabbed the glory) made the transition from ancient tyrannies to the present emphasis on "rule of law" democracies and republics. Because Russia, China, and every other culture in the world lacked this feudal middle era, they all lack any foundation for a culture that respects "rule of law" democracies and republics and they are still struggling to get it. Though lawyers like to trace the rule of law as a modern concept back to the Magna Carta, they all seem to forget that it was Archbishop Stephen Langton of the Catholic Church who came up with the idea of this document in an attempt to force the King to admit submission to Divine Law. You need to read my book "Existential Philosophy of Law" https://valerianodiviacchi.substack.com/p/existential-philosophy-of-law.
Your ridicule of the Church for burning witches and trying to burn Galileo shows your knowledge of propaganda but an ignorance of history. Until a hundred years ago, the Western Churches were made up of the most educated and intelligent persons in society. They did all they could to preserve ancient knowledge until Islam started doing its thing and began burning everything from Persia to Spain. In 785 AD, the Council of Paderborn outlawed the condemnation of people as witches and decreed that anyone who burned a "witch" to death would be punished by execution --- it did this in an attempt to "Christianize" barbarians. For centuries, the Church took the position that witchcraft was an illusion and forbade witch hunts including fighting secular powers who used such hunts and burning to get rid of its opponents. The Church Inquisitions were created in response to the injustices of secular courts and rarely except for the most egregious cases executed capital punishment --- unlike secular courts. You need to catch up on histories written during the last 100 years. Galileo was not threatened with burning for pursuing science, he was threatened because he claimed to have direct knowledge of reality that the learned and educated of the Church knew he could not have. Please read "Against Method"(1975) by Paul Feyerabend who had to admit the Church was right even though he was an atheist. Relativity physics has proven the Church correct: heliocentric or geocentric is simply a question of instrumentalist simplicity and not of descriptive truth (the math for a heliocentric model is simpler thus by Ockham's Razor it is pragmatically truth --- Ockham was a Christian monk). We had the Age of Science because Christianity --- unlike every other religion in history --- believes reason and natural theology find and supports the existence of the Christian God in addition to Faith and revealed theology.
The separation of church and state derives from the biblical "give onto Caesar ...". It was a limit on the federal government not the states. Until well into the 19th Century, all states had a state supported religion financed by a state tax or tithe. Unfortunately, the Church has given up too much power. We now have a situation where secular law has become a religion. You complain about a few people blowing up abortion clinics but not the million babies killed each year as a matter of convenience --- such is the world of secular religion. It is similar to complaining about the fanatics who blew up concentration camps. You have the audacity to complain about Christian atrocities in Lebanon or Bosnia and the like while ignoring that for a millennium once majority Christian communities from Persia to Spain were wiped out by Islamic Hordes in order to create the real Dark Ages that now exist in those areas.
I erred in judging you to be a competent historian.
In fairness, “Atheist” isn’t a word any of these individuals would have used in their own day (and it was a word in circulation). You can make the strongest case for Thomas Paine, but even in his most stringent anti-religious writings, he clarifies his own position as *not* that of an outright atheist. And he played only a background role in influencing the drafting of the actual legal bedrock of the nation.
Jefferson and Franklin certainly qualify as out-and-out deists and said so in their time, but looking at the other framers and signers, it becomes a lot more challenging to label them as anything other than mainstream Christians within a mainstream culture. Nearly all of the signers (minus Jefferson/Franklin) were professed and practicing Christians of one flavor or another; and some of the other men quoted in your poster (like John Adams and Washington) demonstrably had important connections to religious practice their entire lives. Granted, there will be a few quotes here and there expressing a level of skepticism and tolerance that might “look” somehow anti-Christian in isolation, but a balanced reading of the majority of the letters and diaries these men left behind shows that they had more complicated, and largely more outright “religious,” views than not.
Now, how much any of this matters depends on the point you’re trying to make. It’s more complicated than just pointing to the men who wrote the founding legal documents of the country and saying, “they believed this about religion, therefore the country is this.” The fact is, the overwhelming mainstream consensus on religious and philosophical matters in the 18th century was just very different from the consensus of our own day. And that does mean, on a technical sense, that the political and cultural world the founders were helping to shape *was* overwhelmingly, if not entirely, religious (mostly Protestantism brought over from Europe). The level of religious influence on daily life for the average colonist-turned-American would be completely foreign for most of us today. The fact that some of the documents don’t explicitly duplicate the mainstream religious beliefs of the time, doesn’t in itself mean they were “non-Christian” or “anti-Christian” documents. They were working within an altogether different consensus, and that consensus explicitly played a role in shaping their thinking.
What this means for *our* culture is more of a philosophical argument. I don’t think anyone is arguing that our modern society needs to match the exact contours of 18th century American society. It’s unfair to caricature the founders and their beliefs on this question in any particular direction — but if you do want to build a historical argument, you do at the same point need to acknowledge the deep role played by religious institutions in shaping cultural (and philosophical) practice during the time of the country’s founding.