The Founding Fathers of the United States are credited with laying the framework for the Constitution, etc, and in particular many Evangelicals and so-called Religious Right have gone to claim that they were - if not evangelical - were practising Christians.

In particular, the theory that the Founding Fathers were Evangelical Christians is heavily pushed by self-taught historian David Barton.

In fact, Steve Weissman in his Truthout article America's Religious Right - Saints or Subversives? says that "Barton systematically fails to see that many, if not most, of the founders were men of the 17th and 18th Century Enlightenment, who consciously rejected any literal interpretation of the Bible. To the degree they had religious faith, and many did, they believed in a God who - like a cosmic watchmaker - created the world and its natural laws, and then played no further part."

See related topic Deism

"The idea that the Constitution expressed a moral view seems absurd. There were no genuine evangelicals in the Convention, and there were no heated declarations of Christian piety," says historian Robert Middlekauff.

Interestingly, the historian Robert T Handy says that "No more than 10 percent-- probably less-- of Americans in 1800 were members of congregations," and that the Founding Fathers in turn rarely practiced Christian orthodoxy, and many in fact were Freemasons, which according to John J Robinson, "[Freemasonry] had been a powerful force for religious freedom."

With that in mind, it's not surprising then the push for Religious Freedom on the part of the Founding Fathers, since freemasons took seriously the principle that men should worship according to their own conscious, as long as the believed in a Supreme Being.

It is known that Washington, Franklin, Hancock, Hamilton, and Lafayette accepted Freemasonry (check for others).

According to Weissman, "[Deism], as they called their belief, runs unmistakably through the Declaration of Independence, in which Thomas Jefferson wrote of the "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" rather than of the personal, miracle-working God of David Barton's Christianity."

To prove his point, Weissman quotes a Letter to Dr. Woods, "I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition Christianity one redeeming feature. They are all alike, founded upon fables and mythologies."

But, Weissman says that instead of acknowledging the Letter's contents, "Barton short-changes this Enlightenment philosophy," and that "at one point, he even claimed that Jefferson wanted his wall of separation to work in only one direction."

In particular, Weissman says that Barton at one time had claimed that Thomas Jefferson had said that the "Government will not run the church, but we will still use Christian principles with government."

Of course, Jefferson never said anything similar to that, and Barton was forced to retract the statement.

Weissman notes that Barton also quoted James Madison, "the father of the Constitution," as saying that "We have staked the future of all of our political institutions upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God."

Unfortunately, no other historian was able to find documentation of Madison saying anything similar - although they did find him saying quite the opposite, specifically with respect to religious freedom in Virginia. Weissman notes that once again Barton had to recant.