I recently got pulled into one of those Facebook threads about whether America was founded as a Christian nation. One person said the country was founded on biblical principles rather than Christian principles. I liked that distinction more than they probably expected.
I think it points at something the usual argument misses. So here’s my thesis, and I’ll spend the rest of this post trying to earn it: the United States was founded as something like a theistic nation, but not as a Christian one.
The men who did the most to shape our founding documents believed in God. They believed in Providence, in moral law, in a Creator who grants rights, and in a final accounting before that Creator. But several of the most influential among them openly rejected the central claims of historic Christianity. And the federal government they designed was built so it wouldn’t depend on Christianity at all.
That isn’t an attack on Christianity. As a Christian and a pastor, I’d argue it’s one of the better things that ever happened to the faith. And getting this history wrong isn’t harmless. Right now, the old “Christian nation” story is being used to dress up state power in the language of Scripture. We’ll get there.
Three questions, not one
Part of why this argument goes in circles is that “Christian nation” can mean at least three different things:
Were most Americans at the founding Christians?
Were the founders themselves Christians?
Were the founding documents and the federal government Christian?
My honest answers: mostly yes; it depends on which founders; and no. When people say “America was founded as a Christian nation,” they usually slide from the first answer to the third without noticing. That slide is the whole problem.
I should also define “Christian.” I don’t mean “a good person” or “someone who admires Jesus.” I mean the faith the church has confessed for most of its history, summarized in the idea that God came to be physically with us, and Jesus as God in the flesh, was born of a virgin, crucified, and bodily raised from the dead.
Plenty of questions remain open within that faith. I hold more than a few views that put me at odds with my old Bible college professors. But whether Jesus is the Son of God isn’t a side debate. It’s the center.
Theistic rationalism
Historian Gregg Frazer, who taught at The Master’s College, a conservative evangelical school, coined a useful name for what many key founders believed: theistic rationalism. It’s a middle category that fits neither side of our usual argument.
Theistic rationalists weren’t deists in the strict sense. They didn’t believe in a distant clockmaker God who wound up the universe and walked away. They believed God actively governs history, hears prayers, and will judge people after death. That’s why they talked about “Providence” constantly.
But they weren’t orthodox Christians either. For them, reason was the final judge of revelation. Whatever in the Bible passed the test of reason, especially its moral teaching, they kept. Whatever didn’t (miracles, the virgin birth, the Trinity, the divinity of Jesus) they doubted, reinterpreted, or threw out.
Jesus, in this view, was the greatest moral teacher who ever lived. He just wasn’t God.
You can hear it in the Declaration of Independence. It refers to God four times: “Nature’s God,” “their Creator,” “the Supreme Judge of the world,” and “divine Providence.” A deist, a Jew, or a Christian could say every one of those with a clear conscience. There’s no Jesus in it, no Trinity, no Scripture.
Keep that lens in mind as we look at some of the men themselves.
The men at the center
Five founders do most of the heavy lifting in this debate: Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Washington, and Madison. Between them, they drafted, edited, signed, or presided over the documents that define the nation. Here’s what each actually believed.
Thomas Jefferson
Jefferson wrote the first draft of the Declaration of Independence. He also took a razor to the New Testament.
Around 1820 he finished a small book he called The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, now known as the Jefferson Bible. He cut verses out of the Gospels and pasted them into a new arrangement. He kept Jesus’s moral teaching and parables, and removed the virgin birth, the miracles, and the resurrection.
His Gospel ends with Jesus’s body in the tomb and a great stone rolled across the door. Nobody comes back.
He wasn’t shy about why. In 1813 he told John Adams that separating Jesus’s real teachings from the rest of the Gospels was as easy as picking out “diamonds in a dunghill.” In 1820 he wrote to William Short that Jesus “did not mean to impose himself on mankind as the son of God, physically speaking.”
In 1823 he wrote that the story of the virgin birth would one day “be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.” He mocked “the incomprehensible jargon of the Trinitarian arithmetic, that three are one, and one is three.” And in 1822 he wrote that he trusted “there is not a young man now living in the US. who will not die an Unitarian.”
Here’s the fair part, and it matters: Jefferson called himself a Christian. In 1803 he wrote to Benjamin Rush, “I am a Christian, in the only sense in which he wished any one to be.” He meant a devoted follower of Jesus’s moral teaching who believed Jesus never claimed to be more than a man.
So Jefferson wasn’t hostile to Jesus. He admired him enormously, as the finest moral philosopher who ever lived. That’s a lot of things. It isn’t historic Christianity.
Benjamin Franklin
Franklin is the easiest case, because he told us directly. In 1790, Yale president Ezra Stiles asked him what he believed about Jesus. Franklin answered in March, about five weeks before he died.
Franklin answered that Jesus’ “System of Morals and his Religion, as he left them to us,” were “the best the World ever saw or is likely to see.” But he added that they had “received various corrupting Changes,” and that “I have, with most of the present Dissenters in England, some Doubts as to his Divinity.”
As with Jefferson, this is not a Christian confession.
Franklin is also the founder people cite most as proof of the Constitutional Convention’s piety. In June 1787, with the delegates deadlocked, he proposed opening each session with prayer, saying that “God governs in the affairs of men.” It’s a moving speech, and it shows Franklin was no cold deist.
What usually gets left out is what happened next. The convention never adopted his motion. Franklin later noted on his copy of the speech: “The Convention, except three or four persons, thought Prayers unnecessary.”
John Adams
Adams is more complicated, and I want to be fair to him. He went to church his whole life and wrote warmly about Christianity’s moral power. But Adams was a Unitarian, and he rejected the Trinity outright.
In 1813 he told Jefferson that if the two of them had spent forty days with Moses on Mount Sinai and been told there “that one was three and three, one,” they “might not have had courage to deny it, but we could not have believed it.”
Adams also wrote the line “Christian nation” advocates quote most often. I’ll come back to it below, because read in full, it doesn’t say what they think it says.
Adams was also president when the United States ratified the Treaty of Tripoli in 1797. The Senate approved it unanimously, and Adams signed it. Article 11 of the English text begins: “As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion...”
The treaty was read aloud in the Senate and printed in newspapers. There was no recorded debate and no public outcry.
Once ratified, the treaty, sentence and all, became part of what the Constitution calls “the supreme Law of the Land.” The silence that greeted it tells you something about how that generation understood its own government.
George Washington
Washington is the hardest to pin down, because he said so little about his personal faith. He was a lifelong Anglican, later Episcopalian. He served on his parish vestry before the war and attended church fairly regularly. Serious historians land everywhere from “orthodox believer” to “warm deist.”
Here’s what we can say. In his voluminous personal writings, Washington almost never mentions Jesus by name. He prefers words like “Providence” and “the Supreme Being.”
And according to people who attended church with him, including his step-granddaughter Nelly Custis and a clergyman in Philadelphia, he routinely left before communion was served, while Martha stayed.
James Madison
Madison did more than anyone to design the Constitution, and he clearly believed in God. He was just as clear that government had no business propping up religion.
In 1785, when Virginia considered a tax to fund teachers of the Christian religion, Madison wrote his Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments. Much of it is a Christian argument. A government establishment, he wrote, “is not requisite for the support of the Christian Religion. To say that it is, is a contradiction to the Christian Religion itself, for every page of it disavows a dependence on the powers of this world.”
Two years later came the Constitution. It draws its authority from “We the People,” not from God. Article VI says “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” In 1789 Madison drafted the amendments that became the Bill of Rights, including the First Amendment’s ban on an established religion.
In retirement, Madison went further than most Americans would today. In private notes now called the “Detached Memoranda,” not published in full until 1946, he asked whether appointing chaplains to Congress was “consistent with the Constitution, and with the pure principle of religious freedom.” His answer: “In strictness the answer on both points must be in the negative.”
He also argued that presidential proclamations calling the nation to prayer, even as mere recommendations, “imply a religious agency, making no part of the trust delegated to political rulers.” The awkward part is that Madison himself had issued four such proclamations as president, during and just after the War of 1812, at Congress’s request.
He later explained that he’d been careful to make them “absolutely indiscriminate, and merely recommendatory.” By his own reasoning, he had stepped over a line he himself drew.
Christian then vs. Christian now
There’s a deeper problem hiding in the word itself. When founders talked about “Christianity” as the nation’s foundation, they often meant something today’s churches wouldn’t recognize.
John Adams shows the problem better than anyone. In June 1813 he told Jefferson that the founders won independence on “the general Principles of Christianity, in which all those Sects were United.” It’s one of the most-quoted lines in the “Christian nation” argument.
What usually gets left out is the list right before it, describing the young men who had rallied behind him as president. Adams’s list ran from Catholics, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Lutherans to Universalists, Arians, “Priestleyans,” Socinians, “Deists and Atheists,” and “Protestans qui ne croyent rien”: Protestants who believe nothing. There were very few of some of these, he admitted, but they were “all Educated in the general Principles of Christianity.”
Read that list with today’s eyes.
Arians take their name from Arius, the fourth-century priest whose denial of Christ’s full divinity the Nicene Creed was written to reject. The groups closest to that view today, like Jehovah’s Witnesses, are ones most evangelical churches don’t consider Christian.
Socinians and “Priestleyans,” followers of the English minister and chemist Joseph Priestley, were Unitarians who denied the Trinity and taught that Jesus was fully and only human. Their spiritual heirs today are Unitarian Universalists, many of whom don’t call themselves Christians at all.
Deists rejected revelation outright: no inspired Scripture, no miracles, no incarnation. Atheists rejected God. “Protestants who believe nothing” speaks for itself.
Adams belongs on that list too. He rejected the Trinity, and he was a lifelong member of a Quincy congregation that had leaned Unitarian since the mid-1700s. Today it’s a Unitarian Universalist church, and Adams is entombed in its crypt.
So when Adams said the nation rested on “the general Principles of Christianity,” he meant principles broad enough for Arians, Unitarians, deists, and even a few atheists to share. That isn’t a slip. It’s what “Christianity” meant to many educated men of his day: a shared moral inheritance, not necessarily a spiritual matter with a divine savior.
The line has moved in the other direction too. Many Protestants of Adams’s era doubted that Catholics were Christians at all, and several states limited public office to Protestants. Most Christians today would reject that line as firmly as they’d reject Adams’s.
Here’s the problem for anyone quoting the founders today. If you want Adams’s sentence, you have to take Adams’s definition, and his definition stretches “the general Principles of Christianity” to cover people your church wouldn’t let teach Sunday school. If you use today’s definition instead, his sentence stops proving what you need it to prove, and Adams himself stops qualifying.
You can’t have it both ways. The founders’ “Christian” and today’s “Christian” are different words that happen to be spelled the same.
Where the modern idea of “Christian nation” came from
If the founders’ “Christian” was that broad, where does today’s “Christian nation” idea come from? Mostly from later generations, often in times of crisis.
“In God We Trust” first appeared on a U.S. coin in 1864, during the Civil War. It became the official national motto in 1956. “Under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, at the height of the Cold War when Christianity was being positioned against Communism. The motto on the Great Seal, adopted in 1782, is E pluribus unum: “Out of many, one.”
Also during the Civil War, a group of Protestants organized what became the National Reform Association. They wanted to amend the Constitution’s preamble to acknowledge God as the source of civil authority and Jesus Christ as ruler of the nations. They pushed for decades, and it never passed.
Think about what that tells you. Devout nineteenth-century Christians read the Constitution closely, concluded it did not acknowledge Christ, and tried to fix it. They knew what they were looking at.
The most famous official claim that America is “a Christian nation” comes from Justice David Brewer, in an 1892 Supreme Court opinion. In a 1905 book, Brewer explained what he meant. He did not mean Christianity was the established religion, that anyone was compelled to support it, or that every citizen was a Christian.
He meant that Christianity had deeply shaped the country’s people and culture. That’s exactly the distinction I’m drawing.
What about “biblical principles”?
That brings me back to the Facebook distinction between biblical principles and Christian principles. I think there’s something real there.
The Bible absolutely shaped the founding generation. It was the most widely read book in the colonies, and its language was everywhere. One well-known study of American political writing from 1760 to 1805 found the Bible cited more than any other source.
Most of those citations came from published sermons, though. In the debates over the Constitution itself, thinkers like Montesquieu and Blackstone dominate.
Some of the founders’ deepest convictions resonate with Scripture: that humans are created, that they carry a dignity no king can grant or revoke, that power corrupts and must be restrained. When Madison wrote in Federalist 51 that “if men were angels, no government would be necessary,” he was working with a view of human nature any Calvinist would recognize.
But notice what kind of “biblical” that is. It’s the Bible as a source of moral wisdom and a witness to a providential Creator. Those are exactly the parts of Scripture a theistic rationalist could affirm.
What’s missing is everything that makes Christianity Christian: the incarnation, the cross, the resurrection, the Spirit. Jefferson could keep the Sermon on the Mount and throw out the empty tomb, and he literally did. A nation built on the Bible’s moral principles, minus the Christ those Scriptures point to, is about as good a description of theistic rationalism as I can give.
Even “biblical principles” needs an asterisk. The same Constitution counted only three-fifths of the enslaved population for representation, required that people who escaped slavery be returned, and protected the slave trade until 1808. Defenders of slavery quoted Scripture, and so did abolitionists. “Biblical principles” were contested from the very beginning.
Nations don’t get born again
I don’t write this to score points against Christians. I am one. I write it because I think the “Christian nation” story is bad history and worse theology.
It’s bad history because it requires sanding the founders down until they fit our preferences. It ignores Jefferson’s razor, Franklin’s doubts, Adams’s Unitarianism, and Madison’s warnings. And it overlooks how many founders, devout and otherwise, built their lives on the labor of enslaved people and pushed the nation west at the cost of Native lives and land.
During the Revolution, Washington ordered the “total destruction and devastation” of Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) towns. As president, Jefferson wrote that if the United States ever went to war with a tribe, it would not stop until that tribe was “exterminated” or driven beyond the Mississippi.
It’s worse theology because it confuses the kingdom of God with a political project. Jesus told Pilate, “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36). The church spent its first three centuries without political power and grew anyway, under persecution.
Some of its most compromised centuries began when it married itself to the government of the Roman Empire. Madison saw the danger, whatever his private beliefs: a Christianity that leans on “the powers of this world” contradicts itself.
This isn’t just a history lesson. We’re watching the old “Christian nation” story harden into something more dangerous right now.
In September, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth launched what he calls the “Send Me Tour,” a military recruiting push that began with the Corps of Cadets at Texas A&M. He named it after Isaiah 6:8, citing chapter and verse: God asks, “Whom shall I send?” and Isaiah answers, “Here am I; send me.” Then he walked that “send me” through America’s wars, from the Redcoats to “the Islamists,” and said “we need the nation to raise their right hand and say ‘Send me.’”
But read the chapter. Isaiah sees the Lord on his throne and cries, “Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips.”
Only after his sin is purged does God ask whom to send. Isaiah volunteers to carry God’s word to his own people: a word of judgment and a call to repentance they mostly refused. He isn’t enlisting in Judah’s army.
This is the same prophet who warned, “Woe to them that go down to Egypt for help; and stay on horses, and trust in chariots” (Isaiah 31:1). The same prophet who longed for the day when nations “shall beat their swords into plowshares” (Isaiah 2:4). Turning his call into a recruiting slogan doesn’t make the military more Christian. It makes Scripture serve the state.
Let me say it plainly. The Department of War has hijacked a prophet’s call to carry God’s word and turned it into a call to carry the state’s weapons. Isaiah said “send me” so God could send him to speak. Hegseth wants young Americans to say it so the government can send them to bring death upon whomever it names as the enemy.
And it’s a pattern. Since May 2025, Hegseth has hosted monthly “Christian” worship services inside the Pentagon, several led by pastors from his own denomination. That denomination was co-founded by Doug Wilson, a self-described Christian nationalist who preached at the Pentagon himself in February.
In January, at the first service after the U.S. attack on Venezuela, Hegseth read Psalm 144, a war psalm he said he had prayed during the attack. His pastor defended praying in the Pentagon with the story of Franklin urging the Constitutional Convention to pray. He left out what we saw earlier: the convention never took Franklin up on it.
In March, at the first service since the Iran war began, Hegseth prayed that “every round find its mark” and prayed for violence “against those who deserve no mercy.”
It goes all the way to the top. In his 2025 inaugural address, President Trump said, “I was saved by God to make America great again.”
That’s the danger in letting the founders’ loose “Christian nation” language slide into modern Christian nationalism. When the founding generation called America Christian, they were mostly describing a culture. Christian nationalism wants the government itself to speak for God, and once it does, God’s words start working for the government.
A prophet’s call becomes a recruiting slogan. A worship service becomes a prayer that every round finds its mark. When the state borrows our Scriptures, it doesn’t baptize the nation. It turns the church into the state’s chaplain.
Nations don’t get born again. People do.
The founders built a government that protects a person’s freedom to follow Jesus, or not, without the state putting its thumb on the scale. As a Christian, I’m grateful for that. It means that when someone in this country comes to faith, it’s because they met God, not because the government told them to. That’s the only kind of faith worth having anyway.
So yes, America was founded by people who mostly believed in God. The Declaration of Independence speaks of a Creator, Nature’s God, a Supreme Judge, and Providence. In that sense, it was something like a theistic nation.
But it was not founded as a Christian nation. The men who built it knew the difference and wrote it into law. We should be honest enough to know the difference too.