I Don't Know What Most Of The "Founding Fathers" Thought Of Religion...

And I only mention it because I highly doubt that most of the people acting as if they know, know either.

How many "Founding Fathers" were there, anyway?

And in the first place, when are we going to stop using that goddam ridiculous phrase "Founding Fathers"?!

Jefferson was a Deist who acted and spoke exactly like a Christian in public. Adams was a Christian. Franklin and Paine were atheists, and that's all I know for sure.

No, I also know that most of the people living in the original 13 States were Christians.

Okay, I'm done using the phrase with begins with 2 f's, and I'm going to say "leaders of the Revolution" instead. Are you with me? Good.

How many people are we going to count as leaders of the American Revolution? Was it exactly all of the people who signed the Declaration of Independence, and no one else? There were 56 of them -- quick, can you name them all? Let's face it, very few of you could name more than 6 or 7 without cheating with Google first. And by "you" I mean: very few of you who are going around saying: "The Founding Fathers were mostly [fill in the blank with the answer about religion you just pulled either out of your ass or out of a book or TV show or website whose conclusions you find convenient]."

But anyway, there were millions of people living in the future 13 States in 1776, 56 is a ridiculously low number of people to say were in what could be called leadership positions. The 56 signers of the Declaration were not acting entirely on their own, they answered to some other powerful colonists and had to take those other people's opinions and plans into account. 39 people signed the Constitution. Do you know what all of them believed concerning religion? No. Those 39 plus 16 others were delegates to the Constitutional Convention. According to Franklin T Lambert, of those 55, 49 were Protestant and 2 were Catholic. (I sure wish I knew what the other 4 were! Don't you?)

In other words, if most of them were theists or deists, they kept it to themselves, like Jefferson did. Maybe most of them were theists or deists. Secretly. As in: we're all just guessing about this, with the exception of a few of the Revolution's leaders like Jefferson and Adams who really opened up about religion in private letters which have survived and become public.