The Hidden Faith of the Founding Fathers

The majority of the founding fathers were definitely not infidels. To level this charge of infidelity, Mr. Pinto relies on a sermon which he supposes to be the words of Mr. Bird Wilson, a nineteenth century preacher and son of James Wilson, one of the founding fathers. In reality, however, the sermon which Mr. Pinto quotes was not given by Bird Wilson at all. According to the Evangelical Magazine and Gospel Advocate which ran a copy of the sermon printed in the Albany Daily Advertiser, it was actually preached by Henry R. Wilson, and according to the records of the Reformed Presbyterian Church, a very similar sermon was presented by James Renwick Willson. Neither of these men had firsthand knowledge of the faith of our founding fathers. There is no original source material which associates this sermon with Bird Wilson who would have had firsthand knowledge. In addition, one of the portions of the sermon that Mr. Pinto quoted relies on the proceedings of the Constitutional Convention which were said to have been published by Charles Thomson. However, as Mr. Pinto correctly pointed out in an earlier segment of the film, Secretary Thomson never published a book on the proceedings of the Convention.There were many founding fathers who made solid professions of faith in the work of Jesus Christ for their redemption. The list of these men would include such names as Samuel Adams, Elias Boudinot, Charles Carroll, John Dickinson, Elbridge Gerry, Patrick Henry, Samuel Huntington, John Jay, George Mason, Thomas McKean, Frederick Muhlenberg, Robert Treat Paine, Benjamin Rush, Roger Sherman, Jonathan Trumbull, John Witherspoon and many, many more. It is apparent from the text of Mr. Wilson’s sermon that his definition of Christianity is not faith in Jesus Christ but rather an unswerving adherence to the doctrine of Calvinism. It is this measure of Christianity by which Mr. Wilson pronounces the founding fathers to be infidels.Article 11 was not drafted by George Washington. As I have already mentioned, Article 11 was actually a letter written from one Muslim ruler to another. It was definitely not written by George Washington. To support this claim, Mr. Pinto relies on a statement from the “historian” Moncure D. Conway. However, Mr. Conway was not a historian at all but rather a disgruntled Unitarian pastor who eventually abandoned all Christian theology in favor of humanism and free thought. Mr. Conway’s comments on the Treaty of Tripoli begin with his declaration that “President Washington the first time that he ever came in treaty with a non Christian people (Tripoli) sent to the Senate (1776) a treaty which opened with the following..." Mr. Conway then proceeded to quote the entirety of Article 11 verbatim. The errors contained in this statement, some of which were conveniently edited out of Mr. Pinto’s version of it, are so obvious as to cause me to wonder if Mr. Pinto’s video is a deliberate fraud.The Treaty of Tripoli was not America’s first treaty with a non-Christian nation. Mr. Conway claims that the Treaty of Tripoli was the first treaty that President Washington signed with a non-Christian nation, but the Treaty of Tripoli was actually the third of the Barbary Treaties. It was preceded by the Treaty with Algiers signed during Washington’s presidency in 1795 and the Treaty with Morocco ratified by the Continental Congress in 1786. Neither of these treaties contained the text of Article 11. Furthermore, the Treaty of Tripoli was not submitted to the Senate in 1776 by George Washington as Mr. Conway claims but rather by John Adams in 1797. In 1776, there was neither a Senate to receive the treaty nor a President to present it to them nor even an Ambassador to treat with Tripoli in the first place. For Mr. Pinto to quote Mr. Conway as an authoritative historian should give anyone pause in considering if Mr. Pinto himself is deserving of such a label.Thus the document which Mr. Pinto declares to be the strongest evidence against the Christian beliefs of the founding fathers is found to be no evidence at all. It was not written by the founding fathers; they did not choose to include it in the Treaty of Tripoli; there was no reason for them to object to it, and his evidence to the contrary has been shown to be false.

Wow, was I surprised and amazed by this documentary. Based on the title and some reviews I expected yet another misleading attempt by right-wing evangelicals like David Barton (of Glenn Beck fame) to prove that America's Founding Fathers were good Christians who founded our nation on Christianity. The producers and narrator (Christian Pinto) are indeed very right-wing evangelical Christians. If you didn’t know that from researching them independently it becomes obvious early on in their choices of scriptural references and their clear disdain for Obama and Pelosi who they clearly think are phony Christians because they support abortion rights.However, in the first two-thirds of this long film – running 3 hours - the documentary does a thorough and reasonably scholarly job going through the historical documents, not in out-of-context snippets, like Barton and his ilk, but with full context and extrapolation via the Founder’s documented interactions with their compatriots, family, friends, and even, in some cases, their slaves and pastors. The film takes aim at Barton specifically and does a good job proving that the Founders (primarily Paine, Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, and Washington) were not Christians but rather Deists with a pagan Freemason foundation. The film documents the many ways that not only Barton, but even religious Christians in the Founder’s day tried to mislead and whitewash the record to make the Founders appear Christian and attempted mightily , in vain, to obtain deathbed confessions from the likes of Paine and Franklin.But the producers don’t stop there. They not only show the Founders weren’t Christian but also demonstrate that most of them were openly hostile to Christianity and/or many of its tenants – rejecting Jesus’ divinity, virgin birth, miracles and many “fables” of the Old and New Testaments. And this is where things get weird and make this such a strange product of the religious right. Because the producers clearly concur that the Founders were “infidels” and “anti-Christs” and reference much Scripture to support that these men held evil ideas. They then try to tie the freethinking evil ideas of the Founders to devil worship in the 19th-21th centuries and the election of phony Christians like Obama and Pelosi today – with far less scholarship evident to back this up.So the film does a great job destroying one of the perversions of modern right wing evangelicals, to misleadingly portray the US as being founded by Christians with Christian principles. So what are we to make of a country founded by such evil men? The film is silent on this and how the founders could do something so great without a reliance on Christianity. How is a Christian supposed to feel about this? At least the misleading attempts to portray the Founders as Christian give us Christians a sense of solidarity and pride in our faith and Country. This film creates an unintended chasm. I don’t know how to feel about that. But as a comparatively liberal Christian (in comparison with the Barton, Beck, and the producers of this film), I can’t buy this interpretation of history, though I do accept the facts that the Founders were not Christian. I believe the pluralism of religious and non-religious freedom enabled by our Founders is our true strength and if it took non-Christians to see that light first, then so be it.I think many atheists will love this documentary. It unintentionally makes Christians and the religious on both sides of the issue look very silly and pathetic.

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