Last summer I had the opportunity with my First UU Jr. High Religious Education class to watch a video tape from a fundamentalist Christian group which described the piety of the American founders and used this to assert the United States is a "Christian Nation".

Of course, many here know that Unitarians claim several primary founders of our nation as well, naming churches after them.

Can both be right?

What were the "Faiths of the Founders" really like?

We can learn much about their religious and philosophical beliefs from the delightfully literate surviving private letters, diaries, published writings, and speeches of these individuals. Based on the evidence of their own words and actions, let's look at the beliefs of perhaps the four most prominent founders - George Washington, Ben Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson.

As he was first in war and first in peace, we'll begin with President Washington.

Though Washington is perhaps the most consistent in his expressions of appreciation to a supreme being, and has a reputation for traditional piety for this reason, Washington was a religious liberal for his time. Firstly, as far as I can determine by reading many of his public statements and private writings, our first President never referred to a uniquely divine Jesus. Washington, and by his example, almost all subsequent Presidents, preferred a more abstract creator and "father" in all of his religious references.

Washington found a chapel in the wild, and may have in fact preferred that chapel to clapboard and steepled variety. As he did at Valley Forge, the General would steal off into the forest to kneel in prayer. Like other independent thinkers of his day, however, Washington did not take communion in his community Christian church; either not attending on those days when the sacrament would take place, or discreetly leaving before the communion began.

His individualism and piety led our first President to be deeply concerned with religious freedom. In a letter to the Touro Synagogue of Newport in 1790, Washington affirmed the rights of all Americans to the religion of their conscience. This letter was used in early part of the nineteenth century by the Supreme Court to answer a challenge to our freedoms, clarifying that the founders intended freedom for all religions, and not just freedom among Christian sects.

Though Washington may be called the "Father of our Country", in many ways Benjamin Franklin was the father, or at least the elder uncle, of the founders. Franklin, a generation older than most of the other principals, was very influential in their thinking. Franklin's well-known independence in religious belief and his enormous public popularity were important in freeing his younger fellows.

A nominal Presbyterian who enjoyed the company of ministers, Franklin never attended church regularly, reserving the quiet of Sunday mornings for reading and research. However, he donated money to several churches that he deemed used the funds philanthropically, including for a while, Philadelphia's synagogue.

In his writings he revealed an iconoclastic religious faith, and his unconventional, even heretical views were well-known to friend and foe alike, although Franklin had few enemies. In a letter in 1753 Franklin expressed Universalist sentiments when he wrote:

"Jesus professed that he came not to call the righteous but sinners to repentence, which implied his modest opinion that there were some in his time so good that they need not hear even him for improvement; but now a days we have scarce a little parson, that does not think it the duty of every man within his reach to sit under his petty ministrations, and that whoever omits them offends God. I wish to such more humility." Franklin continued "..doing good to men is the only service of God in our power: and to imitate his beneficence is to glorify him"

John Adams, is the only one of the four founders we discuss today who was formally a Unitarian. He is buried on the grounds of the Unitarian Church which he attended. Of course, this church was the leading church of Massachusetts in Adams' day. However, we have other indications that Adams may have been among the most radical of the founders.

Perhaps the most telling evidence of Adams unconventional beliefs, or at least dedicated tolerance, was his sponsorship of Thomas Paine. Paine, born in England, came to America under the "wing" of Benjamin Franklin. Though a printer and popular writer, and not a landed gentleman, he might also be called a founder as his pamphlet "Common Sense" gave words to the growing American Revolution and galvanized the colonies to fight.

After our revolution Paine went to France and his French manifesto "The Rights of Man" served as the voice for that revolt. With the French revolution complete, Paine turned his mighty pen to religion, and for this even the liberal and newly liberated French jailed him. In French prison, Paine completed "The Age of Reason", which contained sentiments such as these:

"But there are times when men… begin to doubt the truth of the Christian religion; and well they may, for it is too fanciful and too full of conjecture, inconsistency, improbability and irrationality, to afford consolation to the thoughtful man. His reason revolts against his creed. He sees that none of its articles are proved, or can be proved." Paine describes the church's interpretation of the bible as "laughable" and terms "Mystery, Miracle, and Prophecy" the "foundations of fraud".

President John Adams, after seeing drafts of the "Age of Reason" implored James Monroe, our Ambassador in France, to secure Paine's release and return him to America. Paine died almost upon reaching our shores, but it was Adams who saw to it that Ben Franklin's grandson published Paine's controversial Age of Reason for American readers.

Near the end of his days, Adams became Jefferson's main correspondent, including the challenging role of responding to the Virginian's views on religion and philosophy. He reflected a compatible liberal view. It was Adams' "stubborn nagging" that encouraged Jefferson to complete his work on the New Testament which we'll discuss later.

Was a Thomas Jefferson a Unitarian or a Universalist? Not formally, however, Jefferson's two closest correspondents regarding religion and philosophy were Joseph Priestley, the English Unitarian minister who moved to the newly United States with Jefferson's encouragement and fellow Declaration signer Dr. Benjamin Rush, a Universalist.

According to the renowned historian Daniel Boorstin, Jefferson, architect of freedom, responsible for the Declaration of Independence and the Louisiana Purchase, cast a God in his own image - a world builder. Jefferson's God had created a complete, self-sustaining world of magnificent ingenuity and detail. Human beings were to create an appropriate "kingdom on earth", a society to fill it. In this way Jefferson thought the American enterprise itself was a holy work.

Of course Jefferson predated the Darwinian revolution, such that he resisted his friend Benjamin Barton's assertions of species extinction, because this would deny the completeness and genius of the Creator's design. President Jefferson, the naturalist, requested that Lewis and Clark, on their great expedition, look for various extinct creatures, including the Mastodon, assuming they had wandered off into other regions.

Ultimately, Jefferson was a materialist in the philosophic sense of the word. He denied a separate spiritual reality and preferred to believe that whatever power and glory God displayed was in this physical reality. Jefferson: "To say that the human soul, angels, God, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or that here is no God, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise. At what age of the Christian Church this heresy of immaterialism or masked atheism crept in… I do not exactly know.. but a heresy it certainly is. Jesus taught nothing of it."

Jefferson, for a time, was disciple of the Unitarian Priestly, but eventually showed himself more radical. For Jefferson and Priestley, God and Jesus were not so much to be worshipped as to be imitated. Both focused on the moral code which Jesus described in his life and words. And both were concerned with degradation of the Christian religion. However, later in life, Jefferson wrote: "I am a Christian, in the only sense he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence; and believing he never claimed any other."

With Adams' urging Jefferson attempted to restore "the true faith" in his The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, nicknamed The Jefferson Bible, which has been influential with some of us here. In this volume Jefferson, a student of six languages, worked from the oldest texts he could find to "edit" the Gospels into a single narrative. The concise and elegant text focuses on the moral teachings of Jesus and omits the miracles. A testament to the significance of faith in the life one who these groups admire, it has been a traditional gift to new members of Congress and graduating UU High School seniors for many years.

Although Jefferson loved the simplicity and eloquence of the teachings of Jesus, In some ways, we can compare Jefferson's faith to the Jewish religion. He believed in God as the very real creator, but not overly interested in the day-to-day life of individuals. Only rarely could the deity be influenced to bend the rules of his magnificent creation on behalf of a whole race. He did not see the grand philosophical history as a contest of good and evil, but rather as one of moral strength and weakness. He read and studied scripture, often quoting the psalmist, but like a good Rabbi, tempered it with life experience and common sense.

Jefferson was perhaps overly optimistic about the Unitarian church. He felt it was so compatible with the American interest in freedom that it could become a defacto national faith, predicting: "there is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die an Unitarian". Sometime later, the patron saint of early American history, Alexis de Tocqueville explained why Jefferson was not more personally assertive of his views, and perhaps why we don't have a larger denomination today. The French sociologist described Christianity as the foundation of societal and political morality and then continued: "It is because many enlightened Americans are convinced of this truth that they not only do they not show the doubts they may have about the reality of Christianity but even hesitate to join new sects such as the Unitarians. They are afraid that they may lead indirectly to the destruction of the Christian religion".

Washington, Franklin, Adams, Jefferson sought protection for religious freedom, not because their grandparents had fled religious persecution, they hadn't, and not merely because they thought it a philosophically "good idea". These men guaranteed the freedom which permits this church to stand because in their deeply considered liberal beliefs, they took these liberties themselves. Their faiths were not a Sunday distraction from statecraft, but rather an important part of each of their lives. They were in fact, radicals in religious thought, and in an age where being a heretic in almost every land on Earth could result in imprisonment or worse, the free state they were building was a sustaining task for their free faith. And for ours.

I'd like to think that if these four were to find themselves in America today, all but perhaps Washington would still be considered religious liberals. They would find much they would and would not like, but that at least three of them, Franklin would still probably not be convinced to go to church, would be here, with us, where they could safely hear me quote Jefferson from an "advice letter" he wrote in 1787: