I found this post online, and I thought it had some really good points to it. The title of the poster is under the name Templar Mind.
You've heard it a thousand times. You may have even sat in a university lecture hall, with fluorescent lights humming overhead, while a professor in a tweed jacket dismantled your heritage.
He told you the Founding Fathers were enlightened Deists. He told you they didn’t believe in miracles, didn’t care about the divinity of Christ, and viewed the Creator as a distant “Clockmaker” who wound up the universe and then went on vacation.
You've heard that these men built a secular machine designed to keep God out of the gears. It's the favorite bedtime story of the radical left. It soothes them.
It convinces them that the United States was always intended to be a godless vacuum where the only moral authority is the state.
It's a lazy way to view history, perpetuated by men who are terrified of a God who acts. Sure, they always point to Thomas Jefferson taking a razor to the Gospels or Benjamin Franklin’s youthful indiscretions.
But they stop reading there because the rest of the story destroys their narrative. Jefferson, even while editing the Gospels, could not escape the God who governs.
He still wrote into the Declaration of Independence that men are “endowed by their Creator” with unalienable rights and closed the document with an appeal to “the protection of divine Providence.”
Franklin, who called himself a “thorough deist” in his autobiography, later admitted he found deism “not very useful” and spent his final years quoting Scripture to a room full of statesmen.
The full arc of their lives undermines the secularist case more than any cherry-picked passage. The men who forged this nation did not believe in an absentee landlord.
They believed in Providence. They believed in a God who fights, who judges, and who intervenes in the mud and blood of human history.
George Washington was not a man of many words, he was a man of action. When he took the oath of office on April 30, 1789, In his First Inaugural Address, he offered what he called his “fervent supplications to that Almighty Being who rules over the Universe, who presides in the Councils of Nations.”
He declared that “No People can be bound to acknowledge and adore the invisible hand, which conducts the Affairs of men more than the People of the United States.”
A Deist doesn't pray for help because a Deist believes no one is listening. Washington prayed constantly. He credited the survival of the Continental Army not to strategic brilliance, but to the direct action of God.
In a private letter to Brigadier General Thomas Nelson on August 20, 1778, Washington wrote: “The hand of Providence has been so conspicuous in all this, that he must be worse than an infidel that lacks faith, and more than wicked that has not gratitude enough to acknowledge his obligations.
That's from a private letter. No audience to impress. No political calculation. Washington is calling anyone who denies divine intervention in the American Revolution “worse than an infidel.”
Then you have Benjamin Franklin. The secularists love him. He is their patron saint of skepticism. Yet, look at the man in the heat of the Constitutional Convention of 1787.
The delegates were at each other’s throats. The union was crumbling before it even began. After five weeks of deadlock, tempers had fractured along the fault line of state representation.
Franklin at eighty-one, the oldest man in the room, stood up. He didn’t appeal to reason. He didn’t appeal to the Enlightenment.
He said, “I have lived, Sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth...that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?”
He quoted Psalm 127: “Except the Lord build the House they labour in vain that build it.” And then he moved that the Convention open each day with prayer, imploring “the assistance of Heaven.”
The motion didn't pass. Alexander Hamilton reportedly objected that calling for prayer might signal desperation. The Convention had no funds to pay clergy. But the procedural failure is irrelevant.
What matters is what Franklin actually believed and said aloud to the men who were building this nation.
This was an old man, staring at the end of his life, telling a room of ambitious politicians that they were fools if they thought they could build without God’s help.
John Adams wasn't at the Constitutional Convention. He was serving as the American Minister to Great Britain in London while the delegates debated in Philadelphia.
But he understood the document they produced better than most of the men who signed it, because he understood its fatal weakness.
Eleven years after the Convention, in October 1798, President Adams wrote to the officers of the Massachusetts Militia. He looked at the Constitution they were all sworn to defend and laid bare its vulnerability:
“Because We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Gallantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Adams understood human nature. He knew that without the fear of God...a specific, terrifying, and active God. liberty turns into license, and license turns into tyranny.
The secular historian tries to tell you that “religious” just meant “generally nice.” It didn’t.
Adams was explicit that the laws of the republic were “emanations of the Divine mind,” that the moral order was grounded in the Creator.
He meant, people who understood they would answer to a Judgment Seat higher than the Supreme Court.
Washington, the general, says religion and morality are “indispensable supports” of political prosperity.
Franklin, the philosopher, says God governs in the affairs of men.
Adams, the lawyer, says the Constitution is a net that only holds moral and religious fish, everything else tears right through.
Three different men, three different temperaments, three different vocations, and the same conclusion:
without God, the experiment fails.
The Founders understood that rights do not come from the King, and they do not come from the parchment of the Constitution.
They come from the Creator. This aligns with the reality of the Imago Dei. We are made in His image, and therefore we possess a dignity that the state cannot grant and cannot take away.
The Fathers of the Church understood this long before Philadelphia.
St. John Chrysostom, in his homilies on Romans, taught that civil authority is ordained by God and that rulers are ministers of divine justice...not autonomous agents of their own will.
St. Basil the Great insisted that those who govern bear a heavier judgment precisely because their authority is borrowed from above.
The American Founders, whether they knew it or not, were working within a framework the Church had articulated for over a thousand years: that legitimate authority flows downward from God, not upward from the consent of the governed alone.
But we must check our own hearts. The “City on a Hill” is the Church, not the United States of America.
America is a beneficiary of Christian truth, but it is not the source of it. We fall into a dangerous trap if we idolize the nation. As it is written, “Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help” (Psalm 146:3).
If we make America an idol, we lose the very faith that made America possible. Jesus is the King of Kings, not just the President of Presidents.
We defend the heritage of this nation because it provided a cradle for the faith, but we must not confuse the cradle with the Savior.
True patriotism is the sober recognition that our freedom is a fragile gift, maintained only by the grace of God and the virtue of the people.
