Were our founders men of faith?

Lest I forget, a few notes about our founders whom we are led to believe were agnostics. Based mostly on David Barton who wrote Original Intent. Continental Congress printed a Bible to be used in schools.

The Founders

Benjamin Franklin recessed the Continental Congress for three days of prayer and contemplation. When governor of Pennsylvania he drew up a plan to encourage wider church attendance. Some historians have discredited him because for his opium use (was in so much pain that he had to be carried to meetings on a chair) and because he was considered by some of his contemporaries to be insane. They don’t mention that it was because he was so fiercely anti slavery. In one letter out of thousands he calls himself a deist, but only to emphasize the belief that it doesn’t matter who you think God is, worship him. When asked about his faith Franklin said there is a god, there is an afterlife where we will have to answer for our sins. We serve God by serving others.

Samuel Adams, governor of Massachusetts called the entire state to prayer and fasting 7 times.

Charles Carol, richest man in America used his estate to endow in perpetuity a chapel and a preacher for a remote area.

Benjamin Rose founded the Bible Society of America and the Sunday School Societyof America.

Stephen Hawkins wrote treatises on Christianity

Robert Payne was a military chaplain

Washington’s adopted daughter described George Washington’s habit of Bible reading and prayer and said that to suggest that he father was not a Christian would be as silly as saying that he was not a patriot.

Jefferson signed his documents not just “In the year of our Lord” as most people did, but “In the year of our Lord Christ.” He instituted church services in the Capitol. The Marine Corp band played the service. Ministers of every denomination took turns. The first woman preacher and the first Black minister in the country spoke there frequently. More than 2,000 people attended. He also established churches in the treasury department, the war department, and at the naval yard. Jefferson published a book called the Red Letter Book, the words of Christ in four languages which was printed every year and handed out to every new member of congress, until 1926 when progressives began taking control of the dialogue and got us to believe that the founders were all atheists.

James Wilson founded the first law school and said that you cannot have good civil law without divine law

Francis Hopkins published a book in which he set the entire book of Psalms to music

Benjamin Rush had a dream about John Adams and Thomas Jefferson who had been in bitter dispute for years. In his dream he saw a book published containing the many enlightening letters exchanged between Adams and Jefferson. He felt the dream was a message of the Holy Spirit and wrote to Jefferson telling him about the dream; and, because they hadn’t written any letters, encouraged them to forget their differences and begin to communicate so that the dream could be fulfilled. Adams and Jefferson agreed that messages from the Holy Spirit must be attended to, buried the hatchet and wrote many letters which have subsequently been compiled entitled The Adams and Jefferson Letters.

The founders were men of faith and duty. George Washington did not want to leave Mt Vernon to fight in the wars or serve as president. Patrick Henry said he had 19 children and 89 grandchildren and he wanted to go home, but he served as well. They pledged their lives and their sacred honor. Seven of them were assonated before they could see the result of their efforts. Seventeen of them lost everything as a result of their stand for freedom and independence. Five were prisoners of war.

Early schools required students to read two books. The Lives of the Signers and The Wives of the Signers. But in 1926 two college professors (Yale, Harvard, I can’t remember which) wrote a book called The Godless Constitution in which they pictured the signers as agnostics and atheists. No footnotes, no scholarly references. A year later a book was published that thoroughly disputed The Godless Constitution, a scholarly book filled with footnotes and references that proved them wrong, but professors at colleges still rely on The Godless Constitution for their information about the founders.

There are 5,600 quotations in the founding papers. The largest percentage of them, 34 per cent, came from the Bible, the largest percentage from the book of Deuteronomy, the book of law of the Old Testaments.