I grew up deep in the American South. Here, Christianity was synonymous with America. Being a good person meant being a good Christian man or woman. Church was a necessity every Sunday, the climax of the week. In the fading memories of early childhood I remember an elderly gentleman bragging that he hadn’t missed a day of Church in years. I would play with my toy cars in the pews while the serious adults listened to sermons, and go to our little classes and hear the stories of Moses or Jesus or Noah. They seemed so wise, so benevolent.

Our church would hold an annual potluck at the school. People came from all over our rural community. I would eat delicious foods, roll my eyes at all the nice adults who told me to eat slower, and then go play with the other kids in the gym. I never thought of it at the time, but church really was the linchpin of the community. It provided meaning, direction, and a sense of purpose. If someone needed help, the churchgoers would always spring to their aid. If someone needed friends, there were countless ones waiting to meet you. No matter what happened in the world or what differences people had, we could all worship God together and that made us strong.

Where did this cute little Christian world come from? Believe it or not, God wasn’t the first thing on the minds of the first English settlers of America. Money was. The early settlers of Jamestown sought to replicate the success of the Spanish gold mines in the New World, and settled in modern Virginia. There they promptly set about the business of starving to death. Eventually realizing that no, there was no gold in Virginia, they started cultivating tobacco. They made so much money growing tobacco to sell that they forgot to grow any food. This was fine though because at least they had lots of money to starve to death with. Eventually they used that money to grow into a huge colony and hire lots of indentured servants and buy lots of slaves.

In colonial America, the southern colonies were seen as a particularly godless part of the world. It was a distant region that didn’t have centralized cities, so it was hard to build churches and gather a community around them. Most people in rural areas didn’t even consider themselves to have a religious affiliation.1 In the few places that did have churches, people didn’t really pay attention. They would doze off or zone out or simply not attend.2 After the English Civil War, it became a bastion of Cavalier refugees who kept their aristocratic habits like having a subservient lower class and practicing blood sports. Southern slavery in particular earned them the disdain of many God-fearing folk.

New England is where Jesus really lived in peoples’ hearts. We all know the story: the Pilgrims arrived on the Mayflower, befriended the Indians who lived on a continent eight-thousand miles from India, and decided that people should eat turkeys once a year. What’s glossed over is that the northern part of America was the dumping ground of all sorts of religious dissidents: Puritans, Jews, Quakers, Catholics, Baptists, and Lutherans. Colonies from Maryland to Massachusetts were founded on religion by religious groups. This religious zeal continued through the 1730’s and 40’s, when over 75-80% of people went to church regularly.3 So many people went to church that they decided to preach even harder at people. This was called the First Great Awakening.

By the time of the American Revolution, though, this was all changing. In the year 1780 only 10-30% of American adults held to a church.4 More importantly, deism had taken root in the colonies. Deism is the idea that yes, there exists a God. Yes, this God created the world. And that’s all that God did. Deists believe that God literally did nothing besides create the world. He never parted the Red Sea. He never appeared before Moses. He never sent his son to die for him. Nothing.

Deism had its roots in the scientific revolution in 17th century Europe. According to deists, the world is a mechanistic machine that can be totally understood through the power of human reason. A single God had created this machine and set it in motion, never interfering with the internal mechanism of His creation. They advocated the use of reason to come to know the world better. In many ways, deism was the atheism before atheism was acceptable. Indeed, many of their critics called them atheists.

How common were these people in America? Benjamin Franklin was a deist, as he clarified in his autobiography.5 He was accompanied by George Washington, James Monroe, and John Adams in believing that their deist dispositions were compatible with Christianity.6 They seemed to associate with Christianity as a set of moral beliefs and cultural practices rather than something literally true that they believed.

Other deists in Revolutionary America were more fiery. Thomas Paine, the man who wrote the famous pamphlet Common Sense, was the most outspoken deist. His lesser-known pamphlet, The Age of Reason, said of religion, “All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.”

Personally, I find Thomas Jefferson’s views of religion to be most interesting. He agreed with many of his contemporaries that Christianity was a benevolent moral force. Yet he was also very clear that he found much of the New Testament to be false. He went so far as to create the Jefferson Bible, where he basically went through the entire New Testament and removed any reference to the supernatural. No miracles, no resurrections, nothing. Just the story of a nice guy who told people to be nicer to each other. This was the story that Jefferson believed. His goal was to create a “rational Christianity”. I wonder how he would feel about modern American Christians.

Deist influences can be seen most clearly in the Declaration of Independence, penned by Jefferson himself. Jefferson wrote that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…” Here, Jefferson isn’t saying that God, father of Jesus Christ our savior gave us these rights. He’s saying that God, the ineffable being that created this universe and did literally nothing else and never had a son named Jesus gave us these rights.

If America was founded at a time when less than a third of people went to church, why does America seem like such a religious country today? There were two more Great Awakenings in the 1800’s that served to establish religion as a powerful force in America. The only thing approaching a motto for most of our history was “E pluribus unum”. The phrase “In God we trust” wasn’t put on coinage until 1864, and on paper currency in 1957. In 1956 is was declared to be the national motto. Similarly, “Under God” wasn’t added to the Pledge of Allegiance until 1954.

Examples like these are why people who say that America was founded on Christianity are a personal pet peeve. No, this was founded as a nation where only about 15% of people went to church and whose leaders literally believed that Jesus was just a nice human. Those leaders wrote a Constitution that doesn’t say anything about religion except to separate it from government. The United States of America wasn’t founded as a Christian nation. It was hijacked by Christianity. The only things around here that were founded on Christianity were some English colonies, and anyone who says this country was founded on Christianity knows so little about this nation’s history that they should probably just go live in an English colony somewhere.

A favorite quote of mine from this era is from President John Adams’s Treaty of Tripoli:

“As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion, … [bunch of other treaty stuff]”

1. Charles Woodmason, The Carolina Backcountry on the Eve of the Revolution: The Journal and Other Writings of Charles Woodmason, Anglican Itinerant ed. by Richard J. Hooker (1969)

2. Jacob M. Blosser, “Irreverent Empire: Anglican Inattention in an Atlantic World,” Church History, Sept 2008, Vol. 77 Issue 3, pp 596-628

3. “II. Religion in Eighteenth-Century America”. Religion and the Founding of the American Republic. Library of Congress. 2001-08-24.

4. Carnes, Mark C.; John A. Garraty; Patrick Williams (1996). Mapping America’s Past: A Historical Atlas. Henry Holt and Company. p. 50. ISBN 0-8050-4927-4.

5. Franklin, Benjamin (1771). Autobiography and other writings. Cambridge: Riverside. p. 52.

6. Holmes, David L. (March 2006). The Faiths of the Founding Fathers