What were the founders’ personal religious beliefs?
They varied widely. The religious views of the framers of the Constitution, as indicated by their own writings, ran the gamut from traditional Christianity to freethought, which included the kind of Enlightenment Deism that posited a god who set the universe in motion but subsequently took no part in the affairs of men-the “unconcerned deity” to whom Scalia refers in his McCreary opinion. The founders’ favorite word for God was “Providence.” Thomas Jefferson wrote a book during his first term as president in which he explicitly stated his belief that Jesus was a great prophet and a good man but not divine-or the son of a divinity. What the founders shared, regardless of their personal religious beliefs, was the Enlightenment conviction that if God existed, he expected humans to rely on their own reason to determine the course of human destiny; the assignment of faith to the sphere of individual conscience rather than public duty; and hostility to all ecclesiastical hierarchies. These r
