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Did you know that 52 of the 55 signers of The Declaration of Independence were orthodox, deeply committed Christians? The other three all believed in the Bible as the divine truth, the God of scripture, and His personal intervention.

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Meaning

“The founding fathers understood that for a country to stand it must have a solid foundation; the Bible was the source of this foundation. They believed that God’s ways were much higher than Man’s ways and held firmly that the Bible was the absolute standard of truth and used the Bible as a source to form the government.”—Paul Ciniraj

Commentary

This is probably intended to be the opening attention-grabber: a startling fact that will get us interested. It actually fails on both fronts; it’s not startling, and it’s not a fact.

This is the sort of thing that ought to stir up anybody’s BS detector. How would anybody know this stuff? I’m not saying that the subject is not amenable to research; in theory it might be possible to determine the religious affiliations and beliefs of any given set of people, but in practice it is filled with pitfalls. Some people keep much the same religious beliefs from cradle to grave; others change slowly, and still others have no fixed beliefs. Some belong to a church or other religious organization, and some don’t. Those who do belong may or may not actually attend, and those who attend may or may not believe in its doctrines. Those who don’t belong may nonetheless have religious beliefs and practices. Some people talk about their beliefs constantly; others are private. Some write them down and communicate them to others, as Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Rush did, while others are comparatively silent—as was George Washington, for example. And unless those beliefs were recorded in some manner, and those records preserved, it is quite difficult to ascertain them after a lapse of a century or two.

One major clue that something is wrong with this 52 out of 55 statistic is that there were 56, not 55, signers of the Declaration. Where did the number 55 come from? The strong likelihood is that the author had in mind M. E. Bradford’s well-known study of the religious backgrounds of the 55 attendees of the Constitutional Convention, in which he concluded that between 50 and 52 of the members of that body were orthodox Christians, the evidence being their having some kind of connection to an “orthodox” Christian church. At least three of the 55 were, he concluded, Deists. But, as Jonathan Rowe points out,

The three of Bradford’s “Deists”—Ben Franklin, James Wilson, and Hugh Williamson—likewise possessed the same formal/nominal connections to Christian churches with an orthodox creed. As did Jefferson, and J. Adams (who weren’t at the CC). And Washington, Hamilton, G. Morris, James Madison and a plethora of other Founders who are not provably “orthodox Trinitarian Christians.” (Hamilton, in fact had NO connection to a Church that professed orthodoxy during the Framing of the Constitution.)

Davis and McMearty agree that

church membership is not a good measure of the actual religious perspective of each of the signatories since Deistic rationalism was not necessarily grounds for losing church membership. In the founding era, church membership was not a good indicator of whether a person was an orthodox Christian. For example, George Washington, though he did not sign the Declaration, was a member of the Episcopal Church in Virginia, but he was known by his closest friends and his minister as a person who was not a communicant (received Lord’s Supper) and more a Deist in his personal religious views.

Certainly there were Founders who were orthodox Christians—Patrick Henry, for example, and John Jay. Roger Sherman. There are others who were clearly not: Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin come immediately to mind. Thomas Paine. And there are others (like George Washington, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton) who were “not provably orthodox Christians during the time in which they founded America” (JR).

To say as the FR author does that they “all believed in the Bible as the divine truth, the God of scripture, and His personal intervention” goes far beyond the available evidence. It is important to keep in mind that about many figures of the time information is lacking. To quote Jonathan Rowe once again:

And with the great many of other lesser Founders, we just don’t know enough to be certain. Proving they had some kind of connection to an orthodox Church—as Bradford did to prove the Founders’ “orthodoxy”—shows nothing more than they could have been as orthodox as Patrick Henry or heterodox as Thomas Jefferson.

Textual Notes

Some copies have changed 55 to 56 (to correspond with the historical reality) and “three” to “four” (to make the numbers add up).

Links

Signers of the Declaration in Alphabetical Order (God & Country)

Signers of the Declaration of Independence (US Constitution Online)

Data on the Framers of the Constitution (US Constitution Online)

Three Misuses of the American Founding & Religion for Political Purposes (Jon Rowe)