“We live in a Christian nation founded on the teachings of the Bible.” In the recent debates regarding the principle of separation of church and state, this sentence may be the single most important and most frequently used argument by the proponents of governmental endorsement of the Ten Commandments and the “under God” phrase. The case for either side of the debate may ultimately hinge on this question: Were the founding fathers Christians and did they have the Bible in mind when they designed the Constitution, effectively creating a Christian nation?

In considering the question of the Founding Fathers’ religious beliefs, there are two main sources of evidence to consider. The first, their public speeches, must be read with the political pressures of the times in mind — in particular, the overwhelming Christian sentiment of the time. Their private letters, our second source of evidence, are likely to contain more of the writers’ true feelings.

While many of the founding fathers made religious endorsements in their public speeches, their enthusiasm quickly fades when they reveal their true feelings to each other in their private letters. Thomas Jefferson, who identified himself as a “real Christian,” had views very different from the mainstream Christian church. It turns out Jefferson, like many of the founding fathers, was more accurately a Deist, attributing the creation of the world to God but rejecting the majority of the Bible as mysticism. Jefferson was a follower of Jesus’ teachings, but rejects the notion of his divinity, writing to John Adams on April 11, 1823, “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.”

Other founding fathers showed their wariness of the church, as well. James Madison, an ardent defender of the separation of church and state, wrote to William Bradford on April 1, 1774, “Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise.” Benjamin Franklin was a Deist, confiding his beliefs in a personal letter to Ezra Stiles on March 9, 1790. After stating his belief that contemporary Christianity was a result of “corrupting changes” and expressing his doubt of Jesus’ divinity, he asks that Stiles not reveal his religious beliefs to anyone in obvious fear of a public backlash.

The most notable non-Christian among the founding fathers is Thomas Paine, who was the author of “Common Sense.” In his publication, “Age of Reason,” he stated, “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.”

While many of the founding fathers professed Christian beliefs, the aforementioned examples make it clear several of the major authors, while still religious, had views deviating from the teachings of the Christian church. Jefferson’s “wall of separation between church and state” was largely a result of his and others’ fear that the Christian church would gain too much power and become entwined with government, as was true in England at the time. Indeed, Madison, Jefferson and others saw just that happening even as they wrote the Establishment clause, and worked tirelessly in those first years, using both their voices and actual legislation, to ensure the church and state did in fact remain separate (see the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, which Jefferson authored).

The actual Constitution itself offers little support for the “Christian nation” theory. In fact, none of the words “Jesus,” “God” or “Bible” even appear. The “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” and the “Creator” that appear in the Declaration of Independence refer not to the Christian God, but to a more general God in the Deist sense (keep in mind that Madison, Jefferson, Franklin, and Paine all believed in God, but not in the Christian God). In fact, even though there are many statements made by founding fathers stressing the Christian religion, no references to Christianity can be found in the Constitution.

The disparity between the words the founding fathers publicly spoke and the words they wrote in the Constitution sends a very powerful message. The authors showed great restraint and wisdom to leave Christianity out of the Constitution. After all, if a Christianity-based government was what the authors intended, it would have been a simple matter to include their intentions in the Constitution. Rather, the founding fathers specifically designed the Constitution to protect Christianity and all other religions by detaching them from governmental support and control.

We may now answer our initial question. Were the founding fathers Christians? Yes, many of them, but not all. Can we then say they intended to endorse a Christianity-based government? The evidence, from the intentionally secular nature of the Constitution to the words and actions of the founding fathers and their explicit design separating church and state, clearly indicates no. Instead, they wisely chose to leave religion not in the hands of the government, but in the hands of the people.