It was the most interesting of the Founders. I’m hoping that caught your attention. Ed and I have both linked to Dr. Gregg Frazer’s excellent paper he presented at the APSA 2008 Annual Meeting, Hynes Convention Center, Boston, Massachusetts, entitled “Gouverneur Morris, Theistic Rationalist.” You should read the entire paper. You can read Ed’s post…

Richard Price, whom most folks have never of, profoundly influenced the American Founding. We blogged about him at American Creation here, here, here and here. His theology, along with Joseph Priestley’s, illustrates the kind of “Christianity” that disproportionately appealed to the Founding Fathers. I put Christianity in quotation marks because Price was a Unitarian of…

Ben Franklin is one of those Founders most likely to be thought of as a “deist.” Now, perhaps that term, in some sense, describes Franklin’s creed, but not in the same sense that it describes Thomas Paine’s. At American Creation Tom Van Dyke has a good post on why Franklin was not a “deist” as…

You can access Thomas Jefferson’s book, Notes on the State of Virginia, here. In discussing rights and God, my co-blogger at American Creation Tom Van Dyke has repeatedly mentioned on these comment threads one of Jefferson’s passages from that book which you can read in context here. The following is the relevant passage from Jefferson’s…

I am happy with the discussion generated by my first post on rights and God. Here is some more food for thought. I think the Acton Institute does a credible job arguing a good scholarly case that religion or Christianity is necessary for human rights. I saw their special “The Birth of Freedom” at its…

Before his son Philip died in in 1801, Hamilton was, for all the years he did his work “Founding” America, like the other key Founders, a theistic rationalist. Douglass Adair and Marvin Harvey wrote an excellent article in the William & Mary Quarterly in 1955 entitled Was Alexander Hamilton a Christian Statesman? Adair and Harvey…

America’s Founders believed political liberty derived from an unalienable — that is God given — natural right to liberty. The ones most notable for articulating this theory were not orthodox Trinitarian Christians who believed the Bible the infallible Word of God. And the Bible itself, from a strict literal interpretation, is entirely unconcerned with political…