“The Founders were devout Christians.”

VerdictPartly true

Some leading Founders, such as John Jay, Roger Sherman, John Witherspoon, Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry, were devout and doctrinally orthodox Protestants. Several of the most famous, including Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, rejected core Christian doctrines in their own letters, and George Washington’s inner beliefs remain genuinely contested. Even the most devout Founders built a federal government with no official religion.Last checked October 2026

The claim usually arrives as a quiet assumption. The men who made America prayed, went to church, quoted the Bible and spoke often of God and Providence, in an overwhelmingly Christian society. So, the reasoning goes, they were Christians in the way a churchgoer today would recognize, and the nation they built carries that faith in its DNA.

There is real evidence behind this. Washington’s Farewell Address calls religion and morality “indispensable supports” of political prosperity. John Adams wrote that the principles on which American independence was won were “the general Principles of Christianity,” along with “the general Principles of English and American Liberty.” A number of Founders were plainly sincere, orthodox believers, and a fair page has to start with them.

The strongest version of the claim is more modest than “every Founder was an evangelical.” Put fairly, it says that the founding generation was overwhelmingly Christian, many of its leaders were serious believers, and a few famous skeptics should not be allowed to stand in for the whole. We checked that version against the record.

First, which Founders?

The answer depends almost entirely on whose names are on the list.

Historian Gregg Frazer, in The Religious Beliefs of America’s Founders (University Press of Kansas, 2012), focuses on what he calls the “key founders”: the men most responsible for the Declaration, the Constitution and the new government’s first years. His list: Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, Gouverneur Morris, James Wilson, Washington and Alexander Hamilton. Political scientist Mark David Hall casts a much wider net, arguing that the founding involved “hundreds of men” who sat in the Constitutional Convention, the ratifying conventions and the first Congress.

Both approaches are legitimate, and they produce different pictures. Since the popular version of the claim usually names the famous men, we look at both groups.

The devout Founders

This is where the claim is on its firmest ground.

John Jay, a co-author of The Federalist, was a committed Christian who thought faith should shape public life. In a letter of October 12, 1816, he wrote that it was “the Duty as well as the Priviledge and Interest of our christian nation to select & prefer Christians for their Rulers.”

Roger Sherman of Connecticut signed the Continental Association of 1774, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution. The Architect of the Capitol calls him “the only member of the Continental Congress who signed all four of the great state papers.” He later served in the First Congress, and Mark David Hall, in his book-length study of Sherman, credits him with helping to draft the First Amendment, according to a review of the book. Hall presents Sherman as a Reformed Protestant whose politics were shaped by his theology.

John Witherspoon was a Presbyterian minister and president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton). The National Constitution Center calls him “the only active clergyman and college president to sign the Declaration.” One of his students was James Madison.

Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry belong on this list too. In his 2011 Heritage Foundation essay, Hall names Sherman, Witherspoon, Jay, Samuel Adams and Henry and writes that “there is abundant evidence that these Founders embraced and articulated orthodox Christian ideas.”

We agree. Anyone who says “none of the Founders were really Christians” is wrong.

The famous Founders, in their own words

The picture changes with the names that appear most often on posters and in sermons.

Thomas Jefferson

Jefferson called himself a Christian, and he meant it in a specific way. In an April 21, 1803 letter to Benjamin Rush, he wrote: “[T]o the corruptions of Christianity, I am indeed opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself.” He went on: “I am a Christian, in the only sense in which he wished any one to be,” explaining that he credited Jesus with “every human excellence, & believing he never claimed any other.” In other words, Jefferson admired Jesus as a moral teacher and did not believe he was divine.

Later letters are blunter. To Ezra Stiles Ely in 1819: “I am of a sect by myself, as far as I know.” To John Adams in April 1823, he predicted that “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.”

Then there is the book now called the Jefferson Bible. Around 1820, Jefferson cut verses out of New Testaments in Greek, Latin, French and English and pasted them into a single account he titled The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. According to Monticello’s account, he “omitted passages that he deemed insupportable through reason,” including references to Jesus’ miracles and the resurrection. The volume stayed in his family until it was sold to the Smithsonian in 1895, and it is now in the collection of the National Museum of American History.

In fairness, Jefferson was not hostile to public religion in every form. Hall points out that he attended church services held in the U.S. Capitol. But on the doctrines that define orthodox Christianity (the Trinity, the divinity of Jesus, the virgin birth, the resurrection), his own pen settles the question.

Benjamin Franklin

Describing his teenage years in his Autobiography, Franklin wrote that after reading arguments against deism, “in short, I soon became a thorough Deist.” He did not stay there. In the same book he lists what he came to regard as the essentials of every religion, beginning with “the existence of the Deity; that he made the world, and govern’d it by his Providence.”

The clearest statement of his mature belief came near the end of his life, in a letter of March 9, 1790 to the minister Ezra Stiles. “Here is my Creed,” Franklin wrote. “I believe in one God, Creator of the Universe.” He called Jesus’ “System of Morals and his Religion, as he left them to us, the best the World ever saw or is likely to see,” and then added that he had “some Doubts as to his Divinity,” though “it is a question I do not dogmatize upon.” He expected, he wrote, “soon an Opportunity of knowing the Truth with less Trouble.”

Franklin is also the delegate who, on June 28, 1787, moved that the Constitutional Convention open each day with prayer, reminding the room that “God Governs in the affairs of men.” The motion was never adopted; according to Madison’s notes, the Convention adjourned “without any vote on the motion.” Franklin was a believer in God. By his own account, he was not an orthodox Christian.

John Adams

Adams is the hardest case for both sides, which is why he is worth reading closely. He was a lifelong churchgoer and, in the same 1813 letter where he praised “the general Principles of Christianity,” he called those principles “as eternal and immutable, as the Existence and Attributes of God.” That letter is quoted often by those making this claim, and it is genuine.

But Adams rejected the Trinity, the doctrine that most churches then and now treat as the heart of Christian orthodoxy. Writing to Jefferson on September 14, 1813, he imagined being on Mount Sinai with Moses and being told “that one was three and three, one.” His conclusion: “We might not have had courage to deny it, but We could not have believed it.” He was a lifelong member of the Quincy congregation now called United First Parish Church, which today is Unitarian Universalist and traces its Unitarian turn to the eighteenth century.

So when Adams praised “Christianity,” he meant something that Trinitarian churches, then and now, would not count as orthodox. Both facts belong on the page.

George Washington

Washington’s beliefs are genuinely contested, and we won’t pretend otherwise.

What is documented: he served as a vestryman of Truro Parish in the Anglican Church for years before the Revolution, attended church throughout his life, and spoke often of Providence. In an interview published by Mount Vernon, its research historian Mary V. Thompson says, “I do believe that the evidence suggests that George Washington was a true Christian,” and that while his religious practice changed over his lifetime, “there is no evidence that he changed his core beliefs.”

What is also documented: his practice around communion changed. His step-granddaughter Nelly Custis, who grew up in his household, wrote in an 1833 letter to the historian Jared Sparks, which Sparks printed in his edition of Washington’s writings, that she had heard her mother say “that General Washington always received the sacrament with my grandmother before the revolution.” But she also recalled: “On communion Sundays, he left the church with me, after the blessing, and returned home, and we sent the carriage back for my grandmother.” Bishop William White, rector of the Philadelphia churches the Washingtons attended during the presidency, gave a similar account. Answering an inquiry in 1835, he wrote that “truth requires me to say, that General Washington never received the communion, in the churches of which I am parochial minister.” The letter is printed in Bird Wilson’s Memoir of the Life of the Right Reverend William White (1839). Nelly Custis herself had no doubts, insisting: “His life, his writings, prove that he was a Christian.”

Historians read this record differently. Mount Vernon’s staff caution against expecting an eighteenth-century Anglican to sound like a modern evangelical; Frazer classifies Washington with Jefferson, Franklin and Adams. The primary sources do not support a confident one-word answer either way.

The middle category scholars argue about

Frazer argues that the key Founders were neither orthodox Christians nor deists. In a 2012 interview, he described their outlook, which he calls “theistic rationalism,” as “a hybrid belief system mixing elements of natural religion, Christianity, and rationalism,” with reason as the final judge. These men believed in an active God who answers prayer, valued parts of the Bible, and rejected the doctrines that reason could not confirm.

Not every historian buys the label. Reviewing the book in 2012, historian Thomas Kidd noted that the Founders never used the term, that most would have called themselves Christians, that Frazer leaves out clearly orthodox figures like Henry and Sherman, and that the thesis sometimes bends the evidence to fit. That is a real scholarly dispute, and readers should know it exists. What neither side disputes is the core evidence above: Jefferson, Franklin and Adams, in their own words, rejected doctrines central to historic Christianity.

Christian or deist?

Were the Founding Fathers Christians or deists? Some were orthodox Christians, a few were deists in the strict sense, and several of the most famous fall somewhere in between. Both one-word answers miss most of them.

What “deist” meant. In the eighteenth century, deism was a religious outlook that, in Britannica’s summary, “accepted religious knowledge that is inborn in every person and can be acquired by reason” and “rejected such knowledge that is acquired through revelation or the teaching of a church.” A deist believed in a Creator, known through nature and reason, and did not rest faith on the Bible as revealed truth. That sounds like a clean category. In practice it wasn’t.

Franklin, between the categories. A few lines after the “thorough Deist” passage quoted above, Franklin’s Autobiography says he “began to suspect that this doctrine, tho’ it might be true, was not very useful.” In the next paragraph he writes, “Revelation had indeed no weight with me, as such,” yet credits “the kind hand of Providence, or some guardian angel” with keeping him out of trouble as a young man. That’s a skeptic of revelation who still spoke of a God at work in his life.

Jefferson and Adams, toward Unitarianism. In a June 26, 1822 letter to Benjamin Waterhouse, Jefferson listed Jesus’ first doctrine as “that there is one God, and he all-perfect,” and added, “I trust that there is not a young man now living in the US. who will not die an Unitarian.” Adams’s rejection of the Trinity and his Unitarian congregation are covered above. Washington’s beliefs are the most contested of all; see the Washington section above.

What scholars call it. Historians have built new categories because the old two don’t fit. David L. Holmes, in The Faiths of the Founding Fathers (Oxford University Press, 2006), sorts the founding generation into what one reviewer lists as “non-Christian Deist, Christian Deist, and Orthodox Christian.” In that reviewer’s reading, Thomas Paine and Ethan Allen fall in the first group; Patrick Henry, Samuel Adams and John Jay in the third; and Franklin and the first five presidents in the deist range. (Robert Cornwall’s review) Another reviewer reports that Holmes calls Washington a “Deistic Episcopalian.” (Gary McGath’s review)

Gregg Frazer draws the line differently. He argues that “Jefferson and Franklin were not, as is universally held, deists,” because they believed in a God who acts in the world, and he calls their outlook theistic rationalism. (2012 interview) Holmes and Frazer disagree on the label. Both conclude that “Christian” and “deist,” used alone, are too blunt for the men people most often name.

Personal faith versus the government they built

Here is the distinction that matters most. Whether any individual Founder was devout is a question about his private convictions. What kind of government the Founders created is a question about the documents they wrote. The answers are different.

The Constitution does not mention God, Jesus or Christianity. (Its only religious-sounding phrase is the standard date formula “in the Year of our Lord.”) Article VI says “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” The First Amendment bars Congress from establishing religion. Roger Sherman, one of the most devout men on our list, signed the Constitution and sat in the First Congress that proposed the amendment.

Hall, the strongest scholarly advocate for a Christian-influenced founding, agrees on this point. His essay states plainly that the “Founders did not want Congress to establish a national church,” and describes America as not having “a Christian Founding in the sense of creating a theocracy.”

The states are a more complicated story, and it is worth telling honestly. In 1784, Patrick Henry sponsored a Virginia bill that would have required taxpayers to pay a tax “for the support of the Christian religion, or of some Christian church,” as the First Amendment Encyclopedia summarizes it. Washington, writing to George Mason in October 1785, said he was not “amongst the number of those who are so much alarmed at the thoughts of making people pay towards the support of that which they profess,” but he wished “an assessment had never been agitated” and hoped “the Bill could die an easy death.”

It did. Madison’s Memorial and Remonstrance argued that the bill was not needed to support Christianity, and that to claim otherwise “is a contradiction to the Christian Religion itself.” Baptists and Methodists, evangelicals who distrusted establishments, helped defeat the bill. Virginia passed Jefferson’s Statute for Religious Freedom instead. Other states followed over the next half century, as our page on the colonies and the founding traces.

As president, Washington told the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, that the new government gives “to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” And in 1797 the Senate approved, without a single recorded objection, a treaty declaring that the U.S. government was “not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion” (see our Treaty of Tripoli page).

Engaging the counterargument: Mark David Hall

The best case against this page comes from Mark David Hall, whose work includes the Heritage essay above and the book Did America Have a Christian Founding? (Thomas Nelson). His argument deserves a full hearing.

Hall contends that the debate is skewed by a handful of famous skeptics. He writes that “there is virtually no evidence that more than a handful of civic leaders in the Founding era” embraced deism, and that the much larger body of Founders were mostly sincere Protestants shaped by Reformed theology. He argues that the Founders’ commitment to religious liberty itself came largely from Christian convictions, and that Madison’s case against Virginia’s assessment was in part a religious one.

Much of this is right, and this page has tried to reflect it. Several key leaders were orthodox, and the push for religious liberty drew heavily on devout Christians, as our separation of church and state page shows with the Danbury Baptists.

But Hall’s argument supports a narrower claim than the one usually made. “Many Founders were devout Christians” is true. “The Founders were devout Christians,” said of the men people actually name (Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Adams), is not, and Hall himself concedes Jefferson was not orthodox. And Hall’s evidence about personal piety does not move the federal text: on his own account, those devout Founders chose not to give the national government a church. That is the gap the claim tends to skip over. It is often offered as a step toward the conclusion that the government was meant to be Christian, and on that federal question the devout Founders’ own choices point the other way.

A note on quotations

Much of what circulates online about the Founders’ faith rests on quotations that cannot be found in their writings. That topic gets its own page: Fabricated Founder quotes. Every quotation on this page links to the document it comes from.

The takeaway

Some Founders were devout, orthodox Christians, and they deserve to be remembered that way. Several of the most celebrated were not, by their own testimony, and the most famous of all left a record honest historians still argue over. The claim is partly true because it depends on which Founder you mean.

What doesn’t depend on which Founder you mean is the government they built together. Devout and skeptical alike, they wrote a Constitution with no established religion and no religious test, and the devout among them largely agreed that was the right choice.

Related claims

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