Is the U.S. a Christian Nation?

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There is no contradiction between acknowledging that most of the Founding Fathers believed in God and some kind of Providence, may even have been practicing Christians, and asserting that they consciously wrote a secular Constitution and intended that the entity it legitimizes, the United States of America, be a secular state, in which religion could flourish precisely because it would be disentangled from government.

As Dr. Vickery notes, it is possible to assemble statements and assessments on both sides of this issue. Unlike ourselves, the Founding Fathers were not always perfectly consistent over time and situation. In what I trust will be seen as the same irenic spirit Dr. Vickery has shown in this exchange, I will limit myself to some quotes from and statements about the three men he references: Washington, Adams, and Jefferson. The Madison quote nicely fits the "No" side of the argument, so there's no need to offer a counter-statement.

George Washington's religious beliefs have been a bit hard for historians to pin down with precision. He clearly believed in God and Providence (one of the terms he almost always used instead of "God"). He was officially an Episcopalian, but hardly an ardent one. Though some relatives insist they saw him take communion, other relatives and the ministers of churches he attended uniformly note that he left church before the communion was administered, a practice some congregants noted as setting a bad example. After the rector spoke of this in a sermon, clearly alluding to the president, Washington "absented himself altogether from church" on communion days. The Right Reverend William White, a personal friend of Washington's and Bishop of Christ Church in Philadelphia, which Washington attended many times over twenty-fine years, wrote to an inquirer: "In regard to the subject of your inquiry, truth requires me to say that General Washington never received the communion in the churches of which I am the parochial minister. Mrs. Washington was an habitual communicant. I have been written to by many on that point, and have been obliged to answer them am as I now do you."

The Rev. James Renwick Willson, an Episcopal minister who wrote about Washington, said in a sermon quoted in the Albany Daily Advertiser in 1831, "There is no satisfactory evidence that Washington was a professor of the Christian religion, or even a speculative believer in its divinity, before he retired from public life.[6] In no state paper, in no private letter, in no conversation, is he known to have declared himself a believer in the Holy Scriptures, as the word of God....Is it probable that he was a true believer in Jesus Christ and his Bible, when in times so trying, and in a Christian nation, he wrote thousands of letters, and yet never uttered a word, from which it can be fairly inferred that he was a believer?" Several other clergymen agreed with another comment by Wilson, to the effect that Washington "was esteemed by the whole world as a great and good man; but he was not a professing Christian."
    
A few weeks after Washington's death in 1799, Thomas Jefferson wrote in his diary that a group of clergymen had written to Washington at the time of his leaving the presidency, trying to persuade him to declare publicly "whether he was a Christian or not" and that "the old fox was too cunning for them" and "passed over [their request] without notice." Jefferson added, "I know that Gourverneur Morris...has often told me that General Washington believed no more in the system [Christianity] than he did." More recent historians have noted that Washington rarely used the word "God," preferring more impersonal terms such as "Providence" and "Invisible Hand" and that he almost never mentioned Christ or used standard Christian terminology.

These are hardly the characteristics of a committed Christian. It seems likely that, As William and Mary history Prof. David L. Holmes has observed in The Faiths of the Founding Fathers, that Washington might be called a Christian Deist, with beliefs and practices standing somewhere between a kind of socially respectable nod to Christianity and the prominent philosophical Deism of the time.

John Adams saw himself as a rational Christian, a term Unitarians often used to describe themselves, and proudly identified his ministers as Unitarians. He decried “Athanasianism,” referring to orthodox Christian Trinitarianism, which asserts the incarnation and deity of Christ, and he urged Thomas Jefferson not to hire European professors at the University of Virginia because "They are all infected with Episcopal and Presbyterian creeds, and confessions of faith....And until this awful blasphemy is got rid of, there never will be any liberal science in the world." (italics mine)

Like others inclined to "rational Christianity, Adams did not believe in miracles, prophecies, or eternal damnation. He believed religion was the source of much strife, but also believed it provided necessary support for morality, without which government cannot exist. He wrote to Jefferson, "Twenty times in the course of my late readings, I have been on the point of breaking out, 'This would be the best of all worlds if there were no religion in it!'" He then added, however, "Without religion, this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite company--I mean hell."

With specific relevance to the issue of this debate, it is clear where Adams stood as to the entirely human origin of the Constitution and the intended secular nature of the United States. In a treatise in defense of the Constitution, he wrote the following:  "The United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature; and if men are now sufficiently enlightened to disabuse themselves of artifice, imposture, hypocrisy, and superstition, they will consider this event as an era in their history. Although the detail of the formation of the American governments is at present little known or regarded either in Europe or in America, it may hereafter become an object of curiosity. It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the influence of Heaven, more than those at work upon ships or houses, or laboring in merchandise or agriculture; it will forever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses."

Thomas Jefferson was, at least early in life, an Episcopalian. He attended services with at least some regularity for much of his life and contributed to various denominations. Like John Adams, he shared many of the views of Unitarians, including their criticism of many orthodox Christian beliefs. Though he was never a member of a Unitarian church, opponents frequently attacked him for his "deistical" beliefs. He was also widely appreciated by many evangelicals, who did not share his theological views, but were grateful that his successful advocacy of the separation of church and state had relieved them of the offense of having their tax monies used to support religious bodies of which they were not members.

Jefferson was a great admirer of Jesus and considered his ethical teachings to be superior to all others, but he regarded such basic Christian doctrines as the deity of Christ, the resurrection, the Trinity, miracles, and the authority of Scripture as the "deliria of crazy imaginations." When he produced his personal edition of the Gospels, he deleted references to miracles, the virgin birth, and the resurrection.

While it is true that there were notable exceptions, such as Patrick Henry and John Jay,  the historian Gordon Wood seems to have been correct when he observed that “it is one of the striking facts of American history that the American Revolution was led by men who were not very religious.  At best the founding fathers only passively believed in organized Christianity and at worst they scorned and ridiculed it." So long as religion supported political harmony, few of them were all that concerned with what a person believed. Historian Daniel Boorstin put it well: “They had found in God what they most admired in men.”