Biographers, historians and constitutional lawyers have been kept busy for more than 200 years trying to determine exactly what America’s founders said, did and meant. That debate is especially alive on the subject of the founders’ faith: What did they mean by religion? What faiths did they believe and practice? Scholars have tried to understand the founders in the context of the late 18th century, a time of political change and intellectual vigor. Meanwhile, some Christians are eager to claim that the founders were orthodox Christians who intended the new nation to reflect that faith.

A rash of books has added new voices and views on the founders and religion. Nobody disputes that America’s founders often invoked God and Providence in their eloquent writings, but those words have given rise to changing interpretations over time. Some call for America to fulfill its mission as a Christian nation. Others argue that America was uniquely conceived to have no single established religion but to make room for all.

Writings by historians explore the nuance and complexity of a group of men who held differing views on religion as well as other matters but agreed on a complex system of government.

 What the founders meant has always been subject to political debate, beginning in their own time, since the founders themselves were politicians, not philosophers. That means there are gaps between the founders’ ideals and actions, just as there are for politicians today. Men who espoused liberty for all held slaves. Legal rights for women came later than rights for emancipated slaves.

Why it matters

Because the founders are an essential part of America’s tradition, laws and identity, what they had in mind in crafting our foundational documents remains a passionate question relevant for today’s most contentious issues: religion and education, immigration, health care, poverty, government funding of religious social services, public expressions of religion and more.

Angles for reporters

• The First Amendment’s provision of religious liberty is frequently cited by Christians seeking a public forum to express their beliefs. Have these issues arisen in your area? Are they connected to views about what the founders meant? Independence Day provides an opportunity to focus on these topics.
• The First Amendment’s reference to religion includes tension because it says the government should neither impose nor prohibit religion: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” How does that tension play out today? Is one valued above the other?
• Who’s reading these books in your area? Lawyers? Church leaders? Check bookstores and forums where books are discussed.
• Liberty for all is an idea articulated for the ages by a group of 18th-century white Western Protestant men. How do people of color, women and non-Christians relate to the ideas and ideals of America’s Founding Fathers?

• Religion and the Founding of the American Republic

  Religion and the Founding of the American Republic is a Library of Congress Exhibition. It provides a history of the role of religion in the founding of the United States.

National sources

• Jon Meacham

  Jon Meacham is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and is executive editor and executive vice president at Random House. His books include American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers and the Making of a Nation. Contact Barbara Fillon at Random House.

  Meacham says the founders struggled to give religion its proper place in society. He uses Benjamin Franklin’s term public religion to describe belief in God as the source of morality, individual rights and dignity, and a charitable spirit, all things which make for a stable and well-governed society.

• David L. Holmes

  David L. Holmes, who lived for some years in the home of James Monroe, teaches religious studies at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va.

  His critically praised book, The Faiths of the Founding Fathers (Oxford University Press, 2006), argues that the founders of the nation were pious men but that relatively few were orthodox Christians and that many were deists.

• Brooke Allen

  Brooke Allen, a cultural and literary critic, is the author of Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers. Allen joined the faculty at Vermont’s Bennington College in 2011.

  In her work, she argues that most of the founders were not terribly devout and were deeply shaped by the humanist Enlightenment rather than by Christianity. The book is based on her essay “Our Godless Constitution” in the Feb. 21, 2005, The Nation.

• Michael Novak

  Michael Novak, philosopher, theologian and public policy commentator at The American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC, is the author of Questions about Liberation Theology (Paulist Press, 1991). He argued that by the late 1980s, liberation theology was in danger “of slipping into a backwater” because it had done very little to help the poor. He is also author of The Joy of Sports: End Zones, Bases, Baskets, Balls and the Consecration of the American Spirit. Many consider his book on sports and religion the first and best on the topic.
  

  Washington’s God: Religion, Liberty, and the Father of Our Country (Basic, 2006), co-written with his daughter Jana Novak, examines the faith of the nation’s first president. The Novaks say that according to the primary and secondary research they did, the evidence is clear that George Washington was no deist. Through careful consideration of his character and his actions and writings as general then president, a clearer picture of the importance of faith to our nation’s first president emerges. Novak is also the author of On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding (Encounter Books, 2001).

• Newt Gingrich

  Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich wrote Rediscovering God in America: Reflections on the Role of Faith in Our Nation’s History and Future (Integrity, 2006). Gingrich has a doctorate in history.

• Gordon S. Wood

  Gordon S. Wood is a professor of history at Brown University in Providence, R.I., specializing in the American Revolutionary era. He wrote Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different (Penguin Press, 2006). In it he argues that the founders had a clear vision of the life of a nation as a matter of moral progress.

• Richard Brookhiser

  Richard Brookhiser is a journalist and author of several works about America’s founders including What Would the Founders Do? Our Questions, Their Answers (Basic, 2006). The historical founders are not gods, and yet Americans’ feelings about them today seem more religious than historical, he says.

• James H. Hutson

  James H. Hutson is chief of the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress and author of The Founders on Religion: A Book of Quotations (Princeton University Press, 2005). Manuscript Division holdings include a rough draft of the Declaration of Independence in Thomas Jefferson’s own handwriting. Hutson has taught history at the College of William and Mary and Yale University.

• David Barton

  David Barton is an author and founder of WallBuilders, which emphasizes an orthodox Christian biblical interpretation of America’s foundation. The Fort Worth, Texas, area organization uses original source documents for its research.

• Tim LaHaye

  Tim LaHaye, co-author of Left Behind, the apocalyptic novel series, also wrote Faith of Our Founding Fathers: A Comprehensive Study of America’s Christian Foundations.

• Vincent Phillip Muñoz

  Vincent Phillip Muñoz teaches religion and and public life at the University of Notre Dame. He focuses on the founders and religious freedom.

• Albert J. Raboteau

  Albert J. Raboteau specializes in African-American religious history at Princeton University.

• Michelle Goldberg

  Michelle Goldberg is an op-ed columnist for The New York Times. She is also the author of Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, which discusses “dominion theology,” which links Christianity and political governance.

• Allen Weinstein

  Allen Weinstein was named the ninth archivist of the United States in 2005. He oversees the National Archives, whose mission includes enabling people to inspect government documents for themselves. The Archives’ home page posts links to regional archives, research centers and presidential libraries, which local reporters may find helpful for reporting stories on the founders.

• Carol Berkin

  Carol Berkin teaches early American and women’s history at Baruch College in New York. She wrote Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America’s Independence (Knopf, 2005).

• Michael Beschloss

  Michael Beschloss is frequently quoted in the media about presidential history. He is NBC News’ presidential historian.

• Peter A. Lillback

  Peter A. Lillback is president of Westminster Seminary in Glenside, Pa., and author of George Washington’s Sacred Fire (Providence Forum Press, July 2006). He says Washington was a Christian, not a deist, helping set a precedent for Christian involvement in public life today.

   

Regional sources

In the Northeast

• David D. Hall

  David D. Hall specializes in 17th- and 18th-century American religious history at Harvard Divinity School and can talk about popular religion during the time of the founders.

• Jonathan D. Sarna

  Jonathan D. Sarna is professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass. He is co-author of Religion and State in the American Jewish Experience and author of American Judaism: A History, which won the Jewish Book Council’s Jewish Book of the Year Award in 2004.

• Jon Butler

  Jon Butler is emeritus professor of American studies, history and religious studies at Yale University. He co-edited Religion in American Life, a 17-book Oxford University series that treats religion as an academic subject for children and young adults.

• Daniel Dreisbach

  Daniel Dreisbach is a nonpracticing lawyer and the author of Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation Between Church and State (New York University Press, 2003). He is also a professor in the school of public affairs at American University in Washington, D.C. He considers himself a “free speech and free exercise libertarian” in that he sides with maximizing free speech and exercise rights.

• Isaac Kramnick

  Isaac Kramnick teaches government at Cornell University and co-authored The Godless Constitution: A Moral Defense of the Secular State (W.W. Norton, 2005). His 1996 American Prospect essay “Is God a Republican?” reflects on religious entanglement in partisan politics. Book co-author R. Laurence Moore teaches American studies at Cornell.

In the South

• John Witte Jr.

  John Witte Jr. directs the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University, where he also teaches law. He is an expert on legal issues related to marriage, family, Christianity and religious freedom. His books include Church, State and Family: Reconciling Traditional Teachings and Modern Liberties and Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment.

• Stephen McDowell

  Stephen McDowell is president and co-founder of the Providence Foundation in Charlottesville, Va. It says its mission is spreading liberty and justice among nations, and it uses the example of America’s founding to illustrate the relationship between theology and civil government.

• David R. Bains

  David R. Bains teaches the history of American Christianity at Samford University in Birmingham, Ala.

• John Eidsmoe

  John Eidsmoe is an Alabama constitutional lawyer, retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and author of Christianity and the Constitution: The Faith of Our Founding Fathers. He has advised former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore. Contact [email protected].

• Mark W. Whitten

  Mark Weldon Whitten is the author of The Myth of Christian America: What You Need to Know About the Separation of Church and State. He teaches religion and philosophy at Lone Star College – Montgomery in Texas. He says new research has shown that the founders had mixed opinions on the role of religion in the state and that the First Amendment provisions about religion — to neither establish religion nor prohibit its exercise — are in tension, with neither having priority over the other.

In the Midwest

• Frank Lambert

  Frank Lambert is a history professor at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., and author of The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America (Princeton University Press, 2003).

• Garry Wills

  Garry Wills teaches cultural history at Northwestern University in Illinois and is a prolific author of books about American history, government and religion.

• Mark Noll

  Mark Noll is Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame and one of the most cited authorities today on evangelicalism in America. He co-founded the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals at Wheaton College, where he taught for many years. Noll’s many books include America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln.

• Catherine A. Brekus

  Catherine A. Brekus is an American religious historian at the University of Chicago Divinity School. She is especially interested in early America and co-wrote a book titled American Christianities: A History of Dominance and Diversity.

• Bruce Braden

  Bruce Braden edited ‘Ye Will Say I Am No Christian’: The Thomas Jefferson/John Adams Correspondence on Religion, Morals, and Values (Prometheus, 2005), source documents that trace the views of Jefferson and Adams over time.

In the West

• Thomas E. Buckley

  Thomas E. Buckley is a Jesuit who teaches American religious history at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, Calif. He wrote Church and State in Revolutionary Virginia, 1776-1787 and is working on a study of Jefferson and religious freedom.

• Catherine Albanese

  Catherine Albanese is Professor Emerita in Comparative Religions & Research at the University of California, Santa Barbara and author of Nature Religion in America: From the Algonkian Indians to New Age (University of Chicago Press, 1991) and America: Religions and Religion, 5th. ed. (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 2012).
  

• Mark David Hall

  Mark David Hall is a professor of political science at George Fox University in Newberg, Ore. Publications include The Forgotten Founders on Religion and Public Life (2009); and The Sacred Rights of Conscience: Selected Readings on Religious Liberty and Church-State Relations in the American Founding (2009).

Related source guides

• Faith of the Founders: Presidents and religion in America