March 28, 2024

Most of America’s Founders Were Trinitarian Christians

It is often stated that America’s founding fathers were mostly Deists. But that contradicts the facts. John Eidsmoe, law professor and author of the classic 1987 book, Christianity and the Constitution, documents in his book the various churches that the members of the Constitutional Convention were members of. More than 50 of the 55 men who attended the convention in 1787 were committed Christians in Trinitarian churches.

John Eidsmoe said to Jerry Newcombe in a television interview in Plymouth, Massachusetts in November 2017: “When you look to that constitutional convention, those fifty-five delegates, we find that contrary to what is commonly being taught today, the overwhelming majority were actively affiliated with Christian churches.  Some fifty or twenty-seven of them were members of the Church of England or the Anglican Church, an orthodox church in those days with a Calvinist confession, the thirty-nine articles.  About seven of them were Presbyterian Calvinists, about the same number were Congregationalist Puritans, again Calvinists, two of them were Dutch Reformed, two of them were Lutheran with a very similar theology in most ways.  There were two Methodists, two Roman Catholics, one who we just don’t know for sure what his religious beliefs were, and that leaves maybe about three or four that you would call unorthodox in their religious beliefs.  That’s a very small minority; it’s about six percent.”