Fireworks over the Founder's Faiths

Jennifer Garza of the Modesto Bee has written one of the better articles to appear recently on the faith of the founders. Here's an excerpt:

But others say Washington's faith cannot be easily labeled.

"The Christianity then isn't the Christianity of today," said David L. Holmes, author of the "The Faiths of the Founding Fathers."

"As the novelist says, the past is a foreign country, they do things differently there. It would be wrong to think of Washington as an evangelical Christian of today."

Nearly all of the Founding Fathers were members of the Church of England, said Gordon S. Wood, a professor of history at Brown University who specializes in the American Revolution and is the author of "Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founding Fathers Different."

He said the founders viewed Christianity differently than many in the general public of their time.

"They were the educated elite, the enlightened men of their time, and they believed in God ? with a few exceptions ? but they tended not to like religious enthusiasm, and there is also that question about whether they believed in the divinity of Christ."

Public vs. private

Thomas Jefferson was either a deist or a Christian in his public life who was known to mock the faith to close friends, Wood said.

John Adams was a Unitarian. James Madison was an orthodox Christian later influenced by deism. Samuel Adams was a rock-solid Congregationalist.

Wood said that what they displayed publicly was sometimes different than what they expressed privately.

"Jefferson could be scornful of religion, but he quickly learned that that attitude got him into trouble with the public," Wood said.

Why do the religious beliefs of men who lived more than 200years ago matter today? "They created the values we use to hold us together," Wood said. Although the debate about the faiths of the Founding Fathers continues, "they believed in the freedom of religious expression," Wood said.