By Joe Broadmeadow
Author’s note: Texas is the latest state to mandate readings from the Bible in schools. Leaving aside the separation argument, there is some validity in reading from such a book if it is placed in its proper context: a non-historical, allegory-filled, self-contradictory series of writings with little separate historical corroboration. Perhaps, if they used Jefferson’s version (look it up), it might be of value. But they won’t.
That it was embraced by some early Americans is accurate. That it was the basis of the foundation of government is a complete falsehood. It is clear Texas, through the right-wing Christian nationalists, is trying to turn the country into a theocracy based on a lie, and we must rise against it.
Every election cycle, politicians wrap themselves in the cross and the Constitution simultaneously, as though the two were stitched from the same cloth. Preachers thunder from pulpits that America was founded as a Christian nation and that any deviation from that premise is a betrayal of the Founders’ sacred intent. It is a compelling narrative. It is also, historically speaking, a fraud.
The men who actually wrote the Constitution—who debated every clause and argued every comma—were not, in any meaningful majority, orthodox Christians. They were children of the Enlightenment, steeped in reason, skeptical of revelation, and deeply suspicious of organized religion’s relationship with political power. To baptize their secular legal masterpiece in the waters of evangelical Christianity is to rewrite history in real time.
The Document Speaks for Itself
Begin with the obvious: the word “Christianity” does not appear in the United States Constitution. Neither does “Jesus,” “Christ,” “Bible,” or “God.” This was not an oversight by men who spent four sweltering months in Philadelphia agonizing over every provision. It was a choice—a deliberate, philosophically grounded choice to construct a government whose authority derived from the consent of the governed, not the grace of the Almighty. The only religious reference in the original document is the First Amendment’s establishment clause, which prohibits Congress from making any law respecting an establishment of religion. That is not a Christian founding. That is the explicit legal rejection of one.[1][2]
Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and arguably the nation’s foremost philosophical architect, was unambiguous about the wall he envisioned. In 1802, he wrote to the Danbury Baptist Association that the First Amendment built “a wall of separation between church and state.” His opponents accused him of seeking the “destruction and governmental rejection of Christianity.” They were not entirely wrong about his intentions—and history has vindicated him.[2][1]
Jefferson: The Architect Who Cut Up the Bible
Jefferson was a Deist—a rationalist who believed in a Creator who set the universe in motion and then stepped back, unmoved by prayer, uninvested in miracles, and uninclined to resurrect the dead. He subscribed to “the liberal religious strand of Deism that values reason over revelation and rejects traditional Christian doctrines, including the Virgin Birth, original sin and the resurrection of Jesus.” He literally took scissors to the New Testament, cutting out every miracle and supernatural claim to produce a slimmed-down version—The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth—that preserved what he considered Jesus’s moral teachings while discarding the theology entirely. The Jesus of Jefferson’s Bible is a wise ethical teacher, not the Son of God.[3][4]
This is the man whose “Nature’s God” and “Creator” in the Declaration of Independence are not the intervening personal deity of Christian worship but the distant, rational first cause of Deist philosophy. When Jefferson invoked God, he was not calling on the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He was citing the cosmic watchmaker of Enlightenment rationalism.[5]
The Hypocrisy No Scripture Can Sanctify
But let us, for the sake of argument, grant the Christian nationalists their premise and ask: by what measure does Thomas Jefferson qualify as a Christian exemplar? The man enslaved over 600 human beings over the course of his lifetime. He held that “all men are created equal” in the same hand that signed the bills of sale for human beings. He fathered children with Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman who, by the logic of chattel slavery, could not legally consent—a fact that no serious historian disputes today.
James Madison, primary architect of the Constitution itself, was also an enslaver. George Washington enslaved more than 300 people at Mount Vernon. These were not incidental biographical footnotes. Slavery was the central economic and moral contradiction of the founding generation—a contradiction that no sincere reading of Christian doctrine, from the Sermon on the Mount to the parable of the Good Samaritan, can reconcile.[6]
If this nation were truly founded on Christian principles, its Founders betrayed those principles before the ink on the parchment was dry. You cannot claim the moral authority of Christ while treating human beings as property. You cannot preach the brotherhood of man on Sunday and auction your neighbor on Monday. The cognitive dissonance required to hold both positions simultaneously is not Christian virtue—it is moral bankruptcy dressed in Sunday clothes.
Madison’s Secular Architecture
James Madison, perhaps the most intellectually rigorous of the constitutional framers, was deeply committed to the separation of church and state—more so than any president before or after him. Though nominally Episcopalian, Madison was never confirmed, used Deistic vocabulary in his public writings, and was an established Freemason. After leaving the presidency, he wrote explicitly of “total separation of the church from the state.” His notes from the Constitutional Convention make clear that the establishment clause was designed to prevent the government from imposing religious beliefs on individuals—full stop.[2][6]
During the Revolutionary and Founding eras, many of America’s intellectual leaders increasingly abandoned traditional Christianity altogether, embracing Unitarian or Deist frameworks that explicitly rejected the divinity of Jesus, the doctrine of the Trinity, and the Bible as the divinely inspired word of God. These were not fringe figures. They were the men in the room where it happened.[4]
What They Actually Believed In
The Founders’ genuine faith was in reason, law, and the rights of man—not in denominational Christianity. Benjamin Franklin, at the Constitutional Convention, proposed opening sessions with prayer and was largely ignored by his colleagues. John Adams, in the Treaty of Tripoli (1797), signed a document explicitly stating that “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.” The Senate ratified it unanimously.
The Christian nationalist argument is not history. It is nostalgia weaponized as theology—a retroactive consecration of a secular document by people who find secular governance philosophically inconvenient. The Founders, to their credit, were smarter than that. They had watched the religious wars of Europe, the Inquisition, the reign of theocratic tyranny, and they built a wall to keep it out.
That wall is not an affront to Christianity. It is the greatest gift a secular government ever gave to religious freedom — including the freedom to be Christian. But freedom of religion only works when it comes with freedom from religion in the public square. That was the Founders’ design. Not a Christian nation. A free one.
Joe Broadmeadow is a retired law enforcement captain and the author of multiple works of literary fiction, political satire, and social commentary.
- https://www.bridgew.edu/stories/2023/doctrine-separation-church-and-state
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_church_and_state_in_the_United_States
- https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/godinamerica-early-america-formation/
- https://csac.history.wisc.edu/2025/07/17/deism-and-the-founders/
- http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=312
- http://earlyamericanhistory.net/founding_fathers.htm
- https://digitalcommons.georgefox.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1097&context=hist_fac
- https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/the-religious-beliefs-of-the-founding-fathers-of-the-united-states-of-america/11967124?nway-content_model=A
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5_rusjJXUk
- https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Founding-Fathers-Deism-and-Christianity-1272214
- https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-founding-fathers-religious-wisdom/
- https://kevincraig.us/deism.htm
- https://www.jamesmadison.gov/system/files/assets/teach-the-constitution/lessons/01_FoundersFreedomReligion.pdf
- https://www.loc.gov/collections/thomas-jefferson-papers/articles-and-essays/american-sphinx-the-contraditions-of-thomas-jefferson/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deism
Joe, thank you for your critique of Christian Nationalism, which has reared its ugly head throughout our nations history. Essentially seeking to blend religious fundamentalism with political goals. The Founders, particularly Jefferson, Washington and Madison understood the threat of a theocracy. As you point out blood had drenched Europe for centuries driven by religious intolerance in its many forms.
I want to comment on the role of James Madison in the framing of the First Amendment to the Constitution that formalizes as separation of church and state. Which essentially states ‘the church will not impose its will on the state, nor will the state impose its will on the church’.
Joe as you know, I’ve been a Baptist pastor for 40 years. Here’s some background on the role Baptists played in the First Amendment. In Virginia there was a Baptist preacher named John Leland. Leland had experienced persecution in Virginia precisely because he was a Baptist, a minority in Virginia, which officially recognized the Anglican Church.
John Leland as a leader among the Baptist community withheld support for the new Constitution because it did not include a clause separating church and state. At that point James Madison was seeking election to the Constitutional Convention. Leland struck a deal with Madison. He would encourage his block of Baptist voters, to vote for Madison in exchange for Madison promising to advocate for an amendment to the constitution of church and state separation. James Madison agreed, and the rest is history.
One last comment. John Leland’s belief in the separation of church and state was not only rooted in being persecuted as a religious minority, but also based in a Baptist distinctive known as ‘Soul Freedom’. A belief that each person has a responsibility before God to follow their conscience. This ‘Soul Freedom’ was given voice by another Baptist, Roger Williams who more than a hundred years earlier, received a charter from the King, granting ‘freedom of religion’ for the colony of Rhode Island. The fist time in history that a governmental charter included that provision. Roger Williams as a Baptist believed that no government, no King can coerce the conscience of another.
It is important for people like yourself who hold a strong faith to rise up (as you already do) to defend the country against such policies. While I may not hold a faith in the same manner I believe there is value in much of Jesus’ teachings without having to accept any level of divinity