As America celebrates its historic 250th Independence Day this weekend, conversations about our nation’s roots are louder than ever. In recent years, a growing movement has sought to blur the lines between church and state, fuelled by the popular narrative that the Founding Fathers were orthodox Christians who intended to establish a legally Christian nation. As Seventh-day Adventists, our deep commitment to prophetic truth and religious liberty compels us to look past modern political myths and examine what history actually says. When we pull back the curtain and read the private letters of America’s architects, we discover a much more complex (and enlightening) truth about their personal faith.
Securing true religious freedom means understanding that the founders intentionally built a framework where faith could thrive freely, completely separate from civil government. We invite you to join us this Sabbath morning as we worship the Creator, study Bible prophecy, and celebrate the beautiful gift of liberty of conscience. Our services begin with Sabbath School at 9:30 a.m., followed by the Divine Service at 11:00 a.m. We would love to welcome you!
The Hidden Faith of the Founding Fathers: What Their Private Letters Reveal
When most Americans picture the men who founded this country, they picture believers. Statues show George Washington kneeling in prayer at Valley Forge. School textbooks quote Benjamin Franklin calling for prayer at the Constitutional Convention. Thomas Jefferson's name sits on monuments next to phrases about a Creator who endows men with rights. The picture is comforting and simple: Christian men built a Christian nation.
But the private letters of these same men tell a far more complicated story. Behind the public language of "Providence" and "the Almighty," many of the founders were wrestling with, doubting, or quietly rejecting core Christian doctrines: the virgin birth, the resurrection, the divinity of Christ, even the reliability of the Bible itself. This is not a matter of speculation. It is documented in their own handwriting, in letters many of them never expected the public to read.
This article walks through what the historical record actually shows about the religious convictions of Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams, men whose public roles required them to speak the language of faith, but whose private correspondence reveals a very different set of convictions, shaped heavily by the European Enlightenment.
The Age of Reason: How Enlightenment Thinking Reshaped Faith
To understand the founders, you first have to understand the intellectual climate they were educated in. The 18th-century Enlightenment placed human reason, not divine revelation, at the centre of how truth was determined. If something could not be verified by observation or logic, Enlightenment thinkers grew skeptical of it, including miracles, prophecy, and supernatural claims in scripture.
This produced a distinct religious position called Deism: the belief that a Creator exists and designed the universe, but that this Creator does not intervene supernaturally in human affairs. Deists generally rejected miracles, the virgin birth, and the divine authority of any single religious text, while still affirming that a rational moral order points back to a divine architect. It was, in effect, "religion filtered through reason."
No founder expressed this philosophy more bluntly than Thomas Paine, and his bluntness is exactly why his story is the clearest entry point into understanding the rest.
Thomas Paine: The Man Who Said the Quiet Part Out Loud
Thomas Paine is best remembered for Common Sense, the 1776 pamphlet credited with turning public opinion decisively toward independence. John Adams himself reportedly said that without Paine's pen, Washington's sword would have been "wielded in vain." Paine also coined the phrase "the United States of America" and later wrote the Crisis pamphlets, which Washington had read aloud to his freezing troops.
Paine's revolutionary credentials, in other words, were unmatched. Which is what makes his later writing so significant.
After the war, Paine published The Age of Reason, laying out his religious views in language far more direct than his peers ever dared use publicly. He wrote:
"I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church."
Paine went further, directly challenging the gospel narrative of Christ's birth and resurrection, calling the New Testament account "a fable" and dismissing the virgin birth as inconsistent with reason. He was not quiet about it, and the backlash was severe, Paine, once a celebrated hero of the Revolution, died in 1809 largely shunned by the public that had once read his pamphlets by the hundreds of thousands.
What matters historically is not just what Paine believed, but what his case reveals: the same Enlightenment reasoning that shaped Paine's open rejection of orthodox Christianity also shaped the private views of men like Jefferson and Adams, they were simply far more careful about how, and to whom, they expressed it.
Thomas Jefferson: Editing the Gospels with a Razor
Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence and is regularly cited as evidence that America's founders intended a Christian government. His own letters complicate that picture considerably.
Jefferson did not consider the Bible, particularly the New Testament, reliable as written. In a letter to John Adams, he described the text as containing "evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man" mixed with what he called "the fabric of very inferior minds", language he used to describe the very passages recounting Christ's miracles and resurrection.
This conviction led Jefferson to a remarkable project: editing the Gospels himself. Using a razor, he physically cut out every passage describing a miracle, the virgin birth, and the resurrection, assembling what remained into a document he titled The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, known today as the Jefferson Bible. What Jefferson kept was the moral teaching. What he discarded was the supernatural claim that Jesus was the Son of God.
Jefferson was equally blunt about the Old Testament. Writing to John Adams about the origins of the Ten Commandments, he questioned the text's reliability outright:
"The whole history of these books is so defective and doubtful that it seems vain to attempt minute inquiry into it."
And in a letter to his young nephew, Peter Carr, rather than urging him toward devotion, Jefferson instructed him to weigh the gospel claims with detached skepticism, presenting the choice between Jesus as the literal Son of God versus a man "of illegitimate birth" punished under Roman law, and telling Carr to "keep your reason firmly on the watch" while reading.
These are not the words of a man seeking to build a nation on the authority of scripture. They are the words of a man applying Enlightenment skepticism directly to the central claims of Christianity, in private correspondence he never intended for public reading.
Benjamin Franklin: Admiration Without Conviction
Franklin's case is more restrained than Paine's or Jefferson's, but no less revealing. A little over a month before his death, Franklin received a direct question about his religious beliefs from Ezra Stiles, then president of Yale University. Franklin's answer is one of the most quoted, and most carefully qualified, religious statements left by any founder:
"As to Jesus of Nazareth... I think the system of morals and his religion as he left them to us, the best the world ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting changes, and I have, with most of the present dissenters in England, some doubts as to his divinity."
Franklin admired Jesus as a moral teacher. He explicitly withheld belief in Jesus's divinity, the doctrine at the very centre of orthodox Christian faith. And rather than resolve the question as death approached, Franklin added that he found it "needless to busy" himself with the matter, since he expected to learn the truth soon enough with "less trouble." It is a striking admission from a man writing what he understood might be among his final letters.
John Adams: Christian Language, Unitarian Convictions
John Adams is often presented as the most conventionally religious of the major founders, and in some respects he was more consistently observant than Jefferson or Franklin. But Adams was a Unitarian, a tradition that explicitly rejects the belief that God exists as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Adams did not believe Jesus was God in human form, and he said so plainly. In one letter, he called the doctrine of the incarnation an idea that the "little ball" of earth was visited by ultimate divinity, language he used dismissively rather than reverently.
Adams's most quoted "Christian" statements need to be read alongside this context. He could write approvingly of "the general principles of Christianity" as a moral framework for government while simultaneously rejecting the specific core doctrines, such as the divinity of Christ, that orthodox Christians of his day considered non-negotiable. For Adams, as for many of his Enlightenment-educated peers, "religion" often meant a shared moral code rather than a specific set of supernatural beliefs about Jesus Christ.
The Treaty of Tripoli: A Founding-Era Statement on Government and Religion
Perhaps the single clearest piece of documentary evidence about how the founding generation viewed the relationship between Christianity and the new government is the Treaty of Tripoli, ratified unanimously by the U.S. Senate in 1797 under President John Adams. Article 11 of the treaty states plainly:
"The government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion."
The treaty passed the Senate without recorded debate or objection, notable, given how forcefully religious language could provoke controversy in that era. Whatever the founders' personal religious convictions, the treaty reflects a careful, deliberate distinction the founding generation drew between their new government's legal foundation and any specific religious tradition.
Public Language Versus Private Conviction
None of this means the founders were hostile to religion as a social institution. Several, including Washington, regularly attended church and spoke of Providence in public addresses. The pattern documented across their letters is more specific: a consistent gap between the language used in public address, where invoking God and Providence served unifying, civic purposes, and the more skeptical, Enlightenment-shaped convictions expressed in private letters to trusted friends and family.
This gap is precisely what later figures and historians have flagged as worth examining. Founders who spoke generally of "the Creator" or "Providence" in public documents were, in their private correspondence, often expressing doubts about the specific claims of orthodox Christianity, the virgin birth, the divinity of Christ, the resurrection, and the inerrancy of scripture.
Conclusion: Reading the Founders on Their Own Terms
The documentary record does not support a single, simple narrative in either direction. The founders were not uniformly devout Christians building a Christian nation, nor were they uniformly hostile atheists. What their letters show is a generation deeply shaped by Enlightenment rationalism, applying the tools of reason to even the most sacred claims of their inherited faith, and frequently finding those claims wanting.
Understanding this distinction matters for anyone trying to assess claims about America's "Christian founding." The founders' own words, read in full context rather than as isolated quotations, point to a more complicated and more interesting story than either side of the modern debate often allows.