Sermon Cloud

The belief in a Creator-God who is not personal and does not react with his creation was quite fashionable around the time of the War for Independence—but not nearly so fashionable as we have been told.  Many historians claim that the Founding Fathers were not Christians, but Deists.  Deists believed in a “God” who created all things but does not intervene in the workings of His creation.  Most of the Founding Fathers who are said to have been Deists were really what would later be called Unitarians. Unitarians, like Christians, believed in a “God” who both created all things and rules all things by His divine providence.  Like Deists, however, Unitarians denied the Trinity: denied that Jesus is God, the second person of the Trinity, and denied that the Holy Spirit is God, the third person of the Trinity.

It is true that Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and George Washington did dabble in Deism to varying degrees.  Franklin and Jefferson were what would later be called Unitarians, and John Adams later became a Unitarian. (Jefferson, of course, had no part in the framing or ratification of the Constitution or the Bill of Rights.) But most of these men thought and acted fairly consistently within a Christian worldview. Their view of man’s sinfulness and of the proper God-ordained role of government generally followed the Bible. Moreover, as historian M.E. Bradford discovered (to his surprise), very few of the statesmen who gave us our independence, the Articles of Confederation, and Constitution were Deists or Unitarians.  At least fifty-one, and probably fifty-three of the framers of the Constitution, and a similar proportion of the leaders of the state ratification conventions, were Christians, not Deists or Unitarians.