Our “founding fathers”–Christians or what?

Our “founding fathers”–Christians or what? November 15, 2011

Recently I’ve been delving once again into deism, or what is more appropriately called natural religion.  (Deism has come to have connotations of belief in a distant, uninvolved and even uncaring God.  That wasn’t true of all who are lumped together as deists and the real sine qua non of “deism” was belief in natural religion, not a doctrine of God.)  I’ve been re-reading Locke (a precursor), Toland and Tindal (among others).  These men thought they were Christians.  Well, there’s some doubt about what Tindal actually thought, but let’s say they all considered themselves Christians–probably “of a higher order” than those around them.
My mind began to wander and wonder about those who claim publicly that most, if not all, of our republic’s founding fathers were orthodox Christians, if not evangelical Christians.  I’m not going to name any names here, but if you pay close attention to this controversy I think you can figure out some of the people I might be referring to.

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