America’s first three presidents were anchors of the Revolutionary War begun in 1776, and they continued as key players in the writing, adoption, and implementation of the Constitution in 1787 and beyond, guiding the infant Republic into the 19th century.

But try telling somebody that George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson expressed a sophisticated and orthodox Christian view of God’s sovereignty in human affairs — and especially in the birth of the American Republic. Odds are the response will be either barely concealed elitist snickers at your alleged ignorance of history or exclamations that you must be one of those extremist “Christian Nationalists” who want to force everybody to go to church.

Representative of the sources behind such responses are these passages from Britannica, the knowledge industry folks who for decades have brought us authoritative encyclopedic information about the ancient world, as well as the world we now inhabit and may well in the future.

“For some time, the question of the religious faith of the Founding Fathers has generated a culture war in the United States. Scholars trained in research universities have generally argued that the majority of the Founders were religious rationalists or Unitarians. Pastors and other writers who identify themselves as Evangelicals have claimed not only that most of the Founders held orthodox beliefs but also that some were born-again Christians,” Britannica tells us.

It’s important to note that Britannica concedes that “no examination of history can capture the inner faith of any person” but then proceeds to claim to have captured the inner faith of most of the major figures of the Founding generation.

Britannica argues that, while most of the Founders in their public utterances adhered to one or another of the Protestant Christian denominations, in their private moments, they espoused profoundly different views that reflected the influence of Deism, the idea that God created the universe, then left it to its own devices. Washington, Adams, and Jefferson, according to Britannica, were “Christian Deists,” though Jefferson allegedly was “more influenced by the Reason-centered Enlightenment than either Adams or Washington.” 

Those Founders Britannica unhesitatingly characterizes as orthodox Christians include Samuel Adams, who was “staunchly Calvinistic,” John Jay, one of the Federalist Papers authors “who served as president of the American Bible Society,” Elias Boudino, who authored a treatise “on the imminent Second Coming of Jesus,” and Patrick Henry, “who distributed religious tracts while riding circuit as a lawyer.”

So how can we determine with confidence the sincere spiritual convictions of the Founders, especially Washington, Adams, and Jefferson? There are actions and written words for each of these men that, unless we think we know better, provide abundant and persuasive evidence.

Jefferson is easiest to identify as a genuine Deist, if only because the Virginian spent a significant amount of his time in the White House deleting New Testament passages that credited Jesus with performing miracles, including the Resurrection. Jefferson’s “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth” mentions only that He was buried in a garden sepulcher and that a stone was used to seal the grave.

Such were Jefferson’s actions, but what were his words and how significant are they? In his Second Inaugural Address, Jefferson described a divine “Being” who was anything but uninterested in His creation:

“I shall need, too, the favor of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our fathers, as Israel of old, from their native land and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessaries and comforts of life; who has covered our infancy with His providence and our riper years with his wisdom and power, and to whose goodness I ask you to join in supplications with me that He will so enlighten the minds of your servant, guide their councils, and prosper their measures that whatsoever they do shall result in your good, and shall secure to you the peace, friendship and approbation of all nations.”

Whatever Jefferson’s private thoughts were, he understood that he had to speak to his fellow citizens in their language, which, judging by his preceding words, reads as if the re-inaugurated chief executive had just read Daniel 2:21-22, which says, among much else, God “removes Kings and sets up Kings.”

The point here is that most Americans were raised in a culture suffused with the Bible, including Jesus’s command to “render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and to God that which is God’s.” It’s no coincidence, either, that Scripture also reported Peter and the disciples declaring to their oppressors that “they must obey God rather than men.”

Jefferson recognized that, to be understood among the generality of citizens of a nation shaped by the Bible, he had to speak in the language of Scripture.

Washington did nothing while in the White House remotely like Jefferson’s Scripture redactions. Throughout the war and in the decades thereafter, Washington on multiple occasions invoked the active intervention of God, something no genuine Deist would do.

“The honor and safety of our bleeding Country, and every other motive that can influence the brave and heroic Patriot, call loudly upon us, to acquit ourselves with Spirit. In short, we must now determine to be enslaved or free. If we make Freedom our choice, we must obtain it, by the Blessings of Heaven on our United and Vigorous efforts,” Washington told a Pennsylvania gathering of his rag-tag Continental Army in August 1776.

Years later in his first Inaugural Address in 1789, Washington reiterated the nation’s debt to the sovereign God, declaring that “no people can be bound to acknowledge and adore the invisible hand, which conducts the affairs of men more than the people of the United States. Every step by which they have advanced to the character of an independent nation seems to have been distinguished by some token of providential agency.”

As for Adams, our first vice president and second president, he made clear his understanding of the relationship between the Christian faith and the principles that motivated the American Revolution. In an 1813 letter to Jefferson, Adams noted the diversity of theological perspectives represented in the Continental Congress that adopted the Declaration of Independence and the reality that, given those divergent views, “the general Principles, on which the Fathers achieved Independence, were the only Principles in which, that beautiful Assembly of young Gentlemen could Unite. … And what were these general Principles? I answer, the general Principles of Christianity, in which all those Sects were United: And the general Principles of English and American Liberty, in which all those young Men United, and which had United all Parties in America, in Majorities Sufficient to assert and maintain her Independence.”

Adams added, just in case Jefferson had any doubt about his point, that “now I will avow, that I then believed, and now believe, that those general Principles of Christianity, are as eternal and immutable, as the Existence and Attributes of God: and that those Principles of Liberty, are as unalterable as human Nature and our terrestrial, mundane System.”

Adams was in some respects the most prolific writer of this trio. And there is no doubt that, as he aged, his personal spiritual convictions underwent refinements and revisions from the conservative Congregationalism of his family tradition. But just as Jefferson found it necessary to speak in the language of the Bible that came so easily to Washington in order to be understood, so Adams recognized the fundamental principles of Christianity represented the common reference point for the movement for American independence.

Eight years after the letter to Jefferson quoted above, Adams dispatched another missive, this one to Louisa Catherine Adams, dated November 11, 1821 (the full text can be viewed on Microfilm Reel 124 at the Library of Congress), in which he posed and answered four questions:

“Question 1: Is this stupendous and immeasurable universe governed by eternal fate? 2. Is it governed by chance? 3. Is it governed by caprice, anger, resentment and vengeance? 4. Is it governed by intelligence, wisdom and benevolence? The first of these three questions I have examined with as close attention as I am able of and have decided them all forever in the negative. The 4th I have meditated with much more satisfaction and comfort to myself and decided unequivocally in the affirmative and from this latest decision, I have derived all my system of divinity.”

To be “governed by intelligence, wisdom and benevolence” sounds very much like an actively engaged, purposeful and sovereign God such as the one we know from the Bible.

This is the first installment of an occasional series examining the faith of the American founders.