Our founding fathers were not Christians.

[JDPriestly]

64. You are defining a Christian as a follower of Christ. In that sense, many deists would be

considered Christian because they agreed with and tried to follow the teachings of Christ.

But usually to be considered a Christian, you need to affirm the divinity of Christ -- and believe in the reality of the trinity. Jefferson did not. He believed that Jesus was very human. But then, very liberal Christians also believe that Jesus was very human. In fact, I recall a man that I have always respected as being the example of a good Christian who said that the works and teachings of Jesus have no relevance to us unless Jesus was a human and not really God while living on this earth. He meant that if Jesus was simply given the grace to be divine to begin with then his example is not something relevant to our experience since obviously we were not given that grace at our birth.

I am a Unitarian, and I do not believe in the divinity of Christ. Today, I would probably not be considered a Christian and do not call myself such, although I agree with the man who considered himself to be a Christian and who was considered at his time to be a Christian but who did not believe that Jesus was born divine.

So if you consider a person to be a Christian although they do not believe in the divinity of Christ but do believe in trying to follow his teachings, then the number of Founding Fathers who were Christian is greater than it is if you define a Christian as one who believes that Jesus was born of a virgin and was from the beginning of his life, divine. The majority of the most prominent leaders of our American Revolution and authors of our Constitution and founders of our nation -- the most prominent -- probably did not believe that Jesus was divine. Jefferson expressed his doubts very clearly especially in his correspondence with John Adams. And in doing so, he agreed with Adams.

I wonder what role the fact that several of the Founding Fathers were Masons played in this. I do not know much about the beliefs of Masons.

I think it is highly unlikely that any of the Founding Fathers were atheists, but I haven't studied this.