This is a reference to History Forgotten, an anonymous essay widely circulated on the internet. There is an obvious factual discrepancy here, in that there were actually 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence. I suspect the writer may have erroneously based his claim on David Barton’s video America’s Godly Heritage, which states that “most of the 55 founding fathers who worked on the Constitution were members of orthodox Christian churches, and many were even evangelical Christians.” I have no reason to doubt the founding fathers’ church membership, and it’s certainly probable that some of them were indeed “deeply committed Christians.” However, my interpretation of the majority of them is that their understanding of “Christianity” was very different from how most evangelicals, or certainly most fundamentalists at least, would define it. It’s true that they often ascribed high value to things like “true religion” and “Christian principles,” but what many of them meant by those phrases seems to have had little to do with personal trust in Christ’s atonement as fundamentalists would define it, or even with belief in his deity or resurrection or anything else that would be considered a fundamental doctrine of Christianity in the traditional sense. Rather, they mostly seemed to be talking about a general system of human ethics and decency that lined up with what Christianity teaches in the Golden Rule, much like the core emphases of the most liberal of mainline theologians that fundamentalism is so staunchly opposed to. The following quote from John Adams illustrates this point. Note his inclusion of universalists (who believe everyone will be saved), Arians (who believe Jesus was created), atheists (who deny the existence of God), deists (who deny God’s continued activity in the world), and people who believe “nothing” (i.e., agnostics) in the set of those who are bound together by “Christian” principles: There were among them Roman Catholics, English Episcopalians, Scotch and American Presbyterians, Methodists, Moravians, Anabaptists, German Lutherans, German Calvinists, Universalists, Arians, Priestleyans, Socinians, Independents, Congregationalists, Horse Protestants and House Protestants, Deists and Atheists, and Protestants qui ne croyant rien [“who believe nothing”] . . . all educated in the general Principles of Christianity and the general Principles of English and American Liberty. . . . The general Principles on which the Fathers achieved Independence were the only Principles in which that beautiful assembly of young gentlemen could unite. . . . – John Adams, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson in 1813 (Later in the same letter Adams also referred to several radically anti-Christian Enlightenment philosophers, including Hume and Voltaire, as those whose writings would be “in favor of these general Principles.”)

