Essentials

The purpose of this page is to educate those who want to knock down the wall between church and state because of a false belief that the U.S.A. was founded by Christians as a Christian nation. Even though I am an agnostic, I had once thought that our "founding fathers" had been less clear on their rejection of Christianity. However, from their own words, I find that they were often very clear on rejecting Christianity as the ravings of lunatics and outright lies. This is not to say that they were atheists. They believed in God in some form. They admired the substantive teachings of Jesus. Big deal. So do Muslims. But the founders were not Christians. They were Deists or Unitarians who denied the divinity of Jesus and believed in the "God of Nature." Enough lies about this, Christians. I have often been accused of being "negative." If you think I'm negative, though, wait until you hear how "negative" our founding fathers were about Christianity. Some of my favorite instances of the founders rejecting Christianity follow.

U.S. Continental CONGRESS: "The government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion."

The Treaty of Tripoli was passed by the Senate in 1797 containing the statement "The government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion." Written during George Washington's administration, this treaty went to the Senate during the Adams administration. It was read out loud to the Senate, and all Senators received copies. It passed with a unanimous vote with no record of dissent. Three papers reprinted it, and the public apparently had no objection. So unanimous, in fact, were our "founding fathers" in this respect that a preacher named Bird Wilson complained in 1831 that "Among all our presidents from Washington downward, not one was a professor of religion, at least not of more than Unitarianism."

James Madision: "The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries."

Often, Christians falsely claim that the wall between church and state is an idea that originated in a letter from Thomas Jefferson, and it was actually written as a single-edged promise of the government to not interfere in religion, not as a doctrine that would keep the church out of government. However, other early authorities were even clearer than Jefferson. James Madison, in an 1803 letter complaining about using public land for churches, wrote "The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries." The founding fathers knew full well what today's Christians don't remember; Christians had been butchering and disembowelling one another over petty differences in dogma for a millennium, and the reason for it was they were all tempted away from their missions by the political power that the United States of America rightly reserved for government. In 1774, Madison wrote "Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise."

John Adams asked: "Have you considered that system of holy lies and pious frauds that has raged and triumphed for 1,500 years?"

Thomas Jefferson: "the day will come, when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter."

In 1787, Thomas Jefferson wrote "Shake off all the fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear." He also wrote that "History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance, of which their political as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purpose." He wrote: "It has been fifty and sixty years since I read the Apocalypse, and then I considered it merely the ravings of a maniac." To Adams, he wrote "The truth is, that the greatest enemies of the doctrine of Jesus are those, calling themselves the expositors of them, who have perverted them to the structure of a system of fancy absolutely incomprehensible, and without any foundation in his genuine words. And the day will come, when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter." Uniquivocally, he writes "I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology." You go, Tom! How about this one? "We discover in the gospels a groundwork of vulgar ignorance, of things impossible, of superstition, fanaticism and fabrication ." In 1814, he wrote "Christianity neither is, nor ever was, a part of the Common Law." He also said that “the common law existed while the Anglo-Saxons were yet Pagans, at a time when they had never yet heard the name of Christ pronounced, or knew that such a character had ever existed.” On the wall between church and state, he writes "I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between church and State."

George Washington, however, kept his beliefs private. We can make inferences that he was not a Christian in his older years in that he requested no clergy or religious sacraments on his deathbed. There are hearsay accounts of Washington not being Christian, such as Thomas Jefferson's experience that "Gouverneur Morris had often told me that General Washington believed no more of that system (Christianity) than did he himself."

Benjamin Franklin: "The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason." | "In the affairs of the world, men are saved, not by faith, but by the lack of it."

Benjamin Franklin wrote ". . . Some books against Deism fell into my hands. . . It happened that they wrought an effect on me quite contrary to what was intended by them; for the arguments of the Deists, which were quoted to be refuted, appeared to me much stronger than the refutations; in short, I soon became a thorough Deist." In 1782, directly rejecting Christian dogma, he wrote "I cannot conceive otherwise than that He, the Infinite Father, expects or requires no worship or praise from us, but that He is even infinitely above it." Note the next one: "I wish it (Christianity) were more productive of good works ... I mean real good works ... not holy-day keeping, sermon-hearing ... or making long prayers, filled with flatteries and compliments despised by wise men, and much less capable of pleasing the Deity." Burn! How about another burn: "Lighthouses are more helpful than churches." On faith, the primary condition of Christianity, he said "The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason." Ouch! How clear does he have to be for the Christians to believe he really doesn't agree with them? Making himself even clearer on faith, he said "In the affairs of the world, men are saved, not by faith, but by the lack of it." Then he "...looked around for God's judgments, but saw no signs of them." His Christian friend Joseph Priestly said "It is much to be lamented that a man of Franklin's general good character and great influence should have been an unbeliever in Christianity, and also have done as much as he did to make others unbelievers.

Thomas Paine: "All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit."

And what of Thomas Paine? "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. All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit."

The Big Lie

Christians, you have been lied to, and flattery has been used to make the lies go down easily. Of course, the irony of the whole thing is that the separation of church and state was created to make sure you always have the right to worship freely as you see fit without other sects being able to persecute you for your beliefs. This is all about your leadership wanting to get their hands on tax funds for "faith-based initiatives," and other end runs around the Constitution. Don't you believe them! -Heretic

Excerpts From The Founding Fathers Were Not Christians
by Steven Morris, in Free Inquiry, Fall, 1995

(Unreality Check Editor's Note: The layout of this article has been altered to include more illustrations, and some of the words have been linked to further resources. Thanks to others who have reproduced Morris's article on the Web.)

The Christian right is trying to rewrite the history of the United States as part of its campaign to force its religion on others. They try to depict the founding fathers as pious Christians who wanted the United States to be a Christian nation, with laws that favored Christians and Christianity.

This is patently untrue. The early presidents and patriots were generally Deists or Unitarians, believing in some form of impersonal Providence but rejecting the divinity of Jesus and the absurdities of the Old and New testaments.

Thomas Paine was a pamphleteer whose manifestos encouraged the faltering spirits of the country and aided materially in winning the war of Independence:
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...Each of those churches accuse the other of unbelief; and for my own part, I disbelieve them all."
From:
The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine, pp. 8,9 (Republished 1984, Prometheus Books, Buffalo, NY)

George Washington, the first president of the United States, never declared himself a Christian according to contemporary reports or in any of his voluminous correspondence. Washington Championed the cause of freedom from religious intolerance and compulsion. When John Murray (a universalist who denied the existence of hell) was invited to become an army chaplain, the other chaplains petitioned Washington for his dismissal. Instead, Washington gave him the appointment. On his deathbed, Washinton uttered no words of a religious nature and did not call for a clergyman to be in attendance.
From:
George Washington and Religion by Paul F. Boller Jr., pp. 16, 87, 88, 108, 113, 121, 127 (1963, Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas, TX)

John Adams, the country's second president, was drawn to the study of law but faced pressure from his father to become a clergyman. He wrote that he found among the lawyers 'noble and gallant achievments" but among the clergy, the "pretended sanctity of some absolute dunces". Late in life he wrote: "Twenty times in the course of my late reading, have I been upon the point of breaking out, "This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!"

It was during Adam's administration that the Senate ratified the Treaty of Peace and Friendship, which states in Article XI that "the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion."
From:
The Character of John Adams by Peter Shaw, pp. 17 (1976, North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC) Quoting a letter by JA to Charles Cushing Oct 19, 1756, and John Adams, A Biography in his Own Words, edited by James Peabody, p. 403 (1973, Newsweek, New York NY) Quoting letter by JA to Jefferson April 19, 1817, and in reference to the treaty, Thomas Jefferson, Passionate Pilgrim by Alf Mapp Jr., pp. 311 (1991, Madison Books, Lanham, MD) quoting letter by TJ to Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse, June, 1814.

Thomas Jefferson, third president and author of the Declaration of Independence, said:"I trust that there is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die a Unitarian." He referred to the Revelation of St. John as "the ravings of a maniac" and wrote:
The Christian priesthood, finding the doctrines of Christ levelled to every understanding and too plain to need explanation, saw, in the mysticisms of Plato, materials with which they might build up an artificial system which might, from its indistinctness, admit everlasting controversy, give employment for their order, and introduce it to profit, power, and pre-eminence. The doctrines which flowed from the lips of Jesus himself are within the comprehension of a child; but thousands of volumes have not yet explained the Platonisms engrafted on them: and for this obvious reason that nonsense can never be explained."
From:
Thomas Jefferson, an Intimate History by Fawn M. Brodie, p. 453 (1974, W.W) Norton and Co. Inc. New York, NY) Quoting a letter by TJ to Alexander Smyth Jan 17, 1825, and Thomas Jefferson, Passionate Pilgrim by Alf Mapp Jr., pp. 246 (1991, Madison Books, Lanham, MD) quoting letter by TJ to John Adams, July 5, 1814.

"The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter." -- Thomas Jefferson (letter to J. Adams April 11,1823)

James Madison, fourth president and father of the Constitution, was not religious in any conventional sense. "Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise."
"During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution."
From:
The Madisons by Virginia Moore, P. 43 (1979, McGraw-Hill Co. New York, NY) quoting a letter by JM to William Bradford April 1, 1774, and James Madison, A Biography in his Own Words, edited by Joseph Gardner, p. 93, (1974, Newsweek, New York, NY) Quoting Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments by JM, June 1785.

Ethan Allen, whose capture of Fort Ticonderoga while commanding the Green Mountain Boys helped inspire Congress and the country to pursue the War of Independence, said, "That Jesus Christ was not God is evidence from his own words." In the same book, Allen noted that he was generally "denominated a Deist, the reality of which I never disputed, being conscious that I am no Christian." When Allen married Fanny Buchanan, he stopped his own wedding ceremony when the judge asked him if he promised "to live with Fanny Buchanan agreeable to the laws of God." Allen refused to answer until the judge agreed that the God referred to was the God of Nature, and the laws those "written in the great book of nature."
From:
Religion of the American Enlightenment by G. Adolph Koch, p. 40 (1968, Thomas Crowell Co., New York, NY.) quoting preface and p. 352 of Reason, the Only Oracle of Man and A Sense of History compiled by American Heritage Press Inc., p. 103 (1985, American Heritage Press, Inc., New York, NY.)

Benjamin Franklin, delegate to the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention, said:
As to Jesus of Nazareth, my Opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the System of Morals and his Religion...has received various corrupting Changes, and I have, with most of the present dissenters in England, some doubts as to his Divinity; tho' it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the Truth with less trouble." He died a month later, and historians consider him, like so many great Americans of his time, to be a Deist, not a Christian.
From:
Benjamin Franklin, A Biography in his Own Words, edited by Thomas Fleming, p. 404, (1972, Newsweek, New York, NY) quoting letter by BF to Exra Stiles March 9, 1790.

Speaking of the independence of the first 13 States, H.G. Wells in his Outline of History, says:

"It was a Western European civilization that had broken free from the last traces of Empire and Christendom; and it had not a vestige of monarchy left, and no State Religion... The absence of any binding religious tie is especially noteworthy. It had a number of forms of Christianity, its spirit was indubitably Christian; but, as a State document of 1796 expicity declared: 'The government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.'"

The words "In God We Trust" were not consistently on all U.S. currency until 1956, during the McCarthy Hysteria.

The Treaty of Tripoli, passed by the U.S. Senate in 1797, read in part: "The government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion." The treaty was written during the Washington administration, and sent to the Senate during the Adams administration. It was read aloud to the Senate, and each Senator received a printed copy. This was the 339th time that a recorded vote was required by the Senate, but only the third time a vote was unanimous (the next time was to honor George Washington). There is no record of any debate or dissension on the treaty. It was reprinted in full in three newspapers - two in Philadelphia, one in New York City. There is no record of public outcry or complaint in subsequent editions of the papers.