WERE THE FOUNDING FATHERS ATHEISTS?

Were America’s Founding Fathers atheists? In my last blog I demonstrated that Thomas Jefferson was a Deist, believing in the Enlightenment manner, that God created the world and left it to us to run it by Reason.

Jefferson did believe in a designer-creator God. He most probably was a Unitarian, not a Trinitarian. And as we saw, Jefferson was extremely critical of the ignorance, superstition and tyranny imposed by various branches of Christianity.

But it is difficult to find an atheist among the Founding Fathers. Deists, yes; agnostics, perhaps; believers, yes. Most all the signers of the Declaration of Independence were church going men. Says David Aikman in his book, The Delusion of Disbelief, several of the signers were ordained ministers.

And of the fifty-six signers, thirty-four were Anglicans, thirteen were Congregationalists, six were Presbyterians; and there was one Catholic, one Baptist, and one Quaker. Nearly the same proportion applied to the thirty-nine men who signed the Constitution. Thus the great majority of our Founding Fathers were indeed believers in God.

Thus in this context we assert the overwhelming influence of religion, especially Christianity, in the development of America. Judaism has had some considerable influence. But since 1620 when the Pilgrims arrived to establish a Christian colony based on the Mayflower Compact, to the late 1900’s, Christianity was the predominant religious influence – not Buddhism, or Hinduism, or Sikhism, or Animism, or Islam or even Judaism – but Christianity.

Despite the skepticism of some of the Founding Fathers toward the tyranny of religion on humanity, Christianity has, on the other hand, freed people from superstition and ignorance. Indeed, until the Civil War began in 1861, approximately 107 of the 137 colleges and universities in America were church founded and church related.

America’s oldest college, Harvard, was founded in l636 by Congregationalists as was Yale in 1701 because Harvard was becoming too liberal!! Presbyterians founded Princeton. Episcopalians started Columbia University, and so on. All of these religiously oriented schools devoted to freeing the mind from ignorance and superstition.

And these developments were due in part to the religious beliefs of our Founding Fathers, who, for the most part, were not atheists, but theists, men who believed in God.