Deism and the Founding Fathers

Separation of Church and State the Result of Enlightenment Ideals

Sep 28, 2009

Many of the Founding Fathers accepted the tenets of Deism, rejecting a state church, religious fanaticism, intolerance, and the intervention of God in human affairs.

The religious beliefs of the Founding Fathers are often a source of debate. There is no doubt that the American nation was founded on “Christian” beliefs, although those beliefs varied widely throughout the early colonial period as different Protestant groups created a rich diversity of faith traditions. By the 18th-Century, however, Enlightenment ideas were finding acceptance among American intellectuals and this included Deism. Deism did not reject belief in God, but was at odds with many long-held beliefs of the established churches.

Chief Elements of Deism

Deists believed that God had created the universe but played no active role in the world other than through the natural processes and through the goodwill of men. The classic Deist example was of a clock-maker who, upon finishing the clock, wound it up and walked away. As the French thinker Voltaire wrote, “the only religion that ought to be professed is the religion of worshiping God and being a good man.”

Deists deplored religious fanaticism and intolerance. Applying reason to religion, Deists like John Adams and Thomas Jefferson rejected the miraculous and the supernatural beliefs of divine intervention with humans. Thus, in Jefferson’s New Testament, the historical Jesus teaches man how to live a life of virtue, but Jefferson’s account leaves out the miracles, the virgin birth, and the resurrection.

Benjamin Franklin was, according to his autobiography, brought up in strict Calvinist piety. Yet already as a teenager he rejected those beliefs and entered a period of doubt. He continues by stating that after reading books critical of Deism, he found the Deist arguments much stronger, concluding that, “I soon became a thorough Deist.” For Thomas Paine, any established church or religion was suspect. In his treatise The Age of Reason, Paine writes that “Each of those churches accuse the other of unbelief; and of my own part, I disbelieve them all.”

1776 was the year of the promulgation of the Declaration of Independence. But it was also the year English historian published The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. This popular and influential treatment ignored the role of piety and supernatural events in the historical rise and ultimate triumph of the early Christian Church. Employing Enlightenment ideals fueled by the earlier Scientific Revolution, Gibbon’s cause and effect relied on natural consequences.

The Founding Fathers and Separation of Church and State

The Founding Fathers were determined to avoid the European example of state churches. The new nation would not seek to “establish a religion” but would not “prohibit the free exercise thereof.” It is significant that these lines are the first ones in the cherished First Amendment, part of the Bill of Rights. Jefferson once wrote that “in every country and in every age the priest has been hostile to liberty; he is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.”

The Constitution also bans the use of religious tests in Article VI, Section 3: “…no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” At certain times in American history, this warning was ignored such as during the early 1850s when the Know-Nothing Party sought to bar Roman Catholics from public office. Addressing Muslims in the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli, John Adams wrote that “the government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.”

Deism as a Transitory Belief

Other forces were at work in the late 18th Century. Frontier revivalism, the first sparks of the Second Great Awakening, was enflaming Americans with a new sense of personal salvation based on a God who was in their midst. While Deism and its Unitarian offspring continued to attract Americans like John Quincy Adams, it was soon forgotten. Most everyday Americans continued to adhere to faith traditions that equated spiritual experience with personal conviction.

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The copyright of the article Deism and the Founding Fathers in Colonial America is owned by Michael Streich. Permission to republish Deism and the Founding Fathers in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.