There's long been a big debate about the degree to which the founders were religious men, and there still is. (They were, although they saw the wisdom of keeping any particular religious view out of the founding.)

Because they are part of our history, I think it's essential to know the religious viewpoints of the founders, although I'm not sure that it's of the earthshaking importance one way or another that so many people think it is. George Washington will do perfectly well as an example. Two camps have been ferociously battling it out over how religious he was. There's one camp which insists he was a "Deist" -- an ill-defined term which seems to mean as many things as there are interpreters of it. While I suspect that many in the "Deist" camp would be just tickled pink to discover that Washington was a closet atheist (or at least an agnostic), I don't see why that would be any more relevant to our lives today as it would if he turned out to be a fundamentalist (er, Biblical literalist).

George Washington and the other men who founded this country did not want their religious views to be controlling! Didn't they risked their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to prevent such a thing from happening? What they wanted was religious freedom. Religious freedom does not consist of being an atheist because some historian discovered that's what Tom Paine was, a get-on-your-knees-and-pray "Low Episcopalian" because some say Washington was, a deist because Franklin was, or someone who considers only Thomas Jefferson's Bible to be the true word of God because Jefferson said so.

They didn't want things to be that way; why should we?

Their religious views aside, they founded a country based on religious freedom and religious pluralism. In addition to belonging to various religions, they were white, they were men. Many owned slaves. Should any of these attributes be controlling in any way over what we do? I cannot see how. What they left was a Constitution, for us to preserve (yeah, protect and defend -- all that stuff) and a republic -- "if we can keep it."

I'd go so far as to say it dishonors their memory to look back in history and behave like a bunch of historical dirt diggers, as if it matters what they thought about God. I don't see how they could possibly have made it any clearer that their personal views did not and should not matter.

Not that they couldn't have, had they chosen to. As Jonathan Rowe points out in a very well-reasoned post, the issue was not new to them:

. . the Founders thought it was absolutely necessary to not define God’s attributes too specifically or indentify him as the God of the Bible.

The Founders specifically drew a connection between indentifying God’s attributes too specifically and denying the rights of those whose religion denied those specific attributes of God. The Founders faced a dilemma: They posited a conception of individual rights which were both universal and antecedent to majority rule. Moreover, they needed to refute prior claims of right such as Divine Right of Kings which explicitly invoked God to justify such claims. The Founders thus needed to tie their notion of rights to God to make such individual rights unalienable.

Yet, invoking God as the source of political claims had long led to terrible persecution itself (indeed, it was the source of religious persecution which they were trying to solve). If it is claimed that God X grants rights, the Founders feared political forces would deny rights to those who didn’t believe in God X. But such rights, the Founders believed, applied to everyone regardless of what they believed.

From pulpits all around America, in pamphlets distributed in all of the original 13 states, and in newspaper editorials as well, the religious right of that day railed against the Constitution as a godless document that would bring down the wrath of God upon us all.

But what about the Declaration of Independence. Doesn't that mention God repeatedly? Well, yes. There's the Creator. There's Nature's God. But somehow, neither Jehovah nor Jesus warranted a mention.

I've just been wondering about this in the context of men playing God, men wanting to be God, and men trying to speak for God. Such behavior has a long, often bloody history. And what about the "divine right of kings?" This was a very serious concept, and it was based on the idea of an all-knowing, all-seeing deity who intervened in human affairs, which meant you could be sure that if a king was on a throne, it was his king, by God. (Forgive the redundancy.)

The founders were of course still smarting from their recent scrape with that sort of nonsense, and I don't think it's unreasonable to conclude that it might have had an effect on their thinking about divine intervention, and how to work with something that many people believed in, but which must have been humbling for them to contemplate, seeing their new roles unfold. I mean, if you grow up steeped in the divine right of kings, and you suddenly find yourself taking the place of He Who Had Been Ordained By God, it would be no small task to come up with the proper language reigning in your human limits. It must have been doubly tough for those founders who did believe in divine intervention to live with the possibility that God might very well have intervened -- against King George, and for them!

(Hey, I know I couldn't have handled it. . .)

For the most part, these men were not theologians. So what did they do? According to many of the pundits today, they declared that man had inherent "natural rights" but what they really meant by this was that the rights came from God, which meant no man could take them away.

Quite a turnabout from divine right of kings, isn't it? Because if there was a divine right of kings, God had been putting them on the throne and acquiescing to their vast tyrannical powers for many hundreds (nay, thousands) of years.

Why, I think there are even kings in the Bible, and if we take those king references in the same literal manner that we're supposed to take other things in the Bible, a good argument can be made that the Bible itself justifies monarchy.

What that means is it might have been tough for these men to look God and their fellow men in the eyes and say,

"Look, God gave men their natural rights, but the tyrants took them away and they lied when they claimed that their authority came from God. But this time, we're telling you the truth! God gave us Natural Rights! And he really did it all along, but he's never made that clear until now! Through us!"

Had they simply declared that the rights we enjoy were given to us by God, they'd have been playing the same game that they had seen played for too long: men playing God, and men speaking for God. They knew that whoever gets to define and speak for God gets to be God. So once God is placed into something as a legal concept, first come the definitions of God, and then come the rules of God. But look who's writing them! (That is why, IMHO, the word "God" does not appear in the text of the Constitution. It not only would have been arrogant, it would have set in motion an uncontrollable series of events.)

I think it's significant that the Declaration (not legally controlling, but evidence of founding philosophy) -- which comes closest to grappling with the issue of deity -- scrupulously avoids Biblical language. Not only that, but the natural rights language uses the term "endowed by their creator." That is a far cry from "granted by God." Something granted by God can be limited or even taken away by God. Again, who gets to define God? Is God a book? Which book, and why, and who gets to say so, and why?

"Creator" avoids this problem by moving the deity to the metaphysical level -- the being force of creation. The great unsolved, unsolvable, where-we-came-from question. And even our creator (he or she or it) did not "give" or "grant" us anything.

We were endowed!

If you're endowed with something, it's part of you, just as surely as your brain, your arms, your legs, and other, um, endowments. That's not conditional.

The founders didn't just change God's role in human government by taking his backing away from the king and suddenly handing it over to natural rights. They did a lot more, by doing a lot less. They didn't remove God from human affairs, and I don't think they intended to remove God from government. I think they hoped God would wish the country well, and would shine his benevolence down on the new republic. That was their hope, but it was a human one.

Wanting to be right in the eyes of God is a good goal.

Knowing you're right in the eyes of God is not a good way to start a country.

We should all be glad the founders learned from the past. It would be nice if we all could.

MORE: FWIW, I didn't like writing this, and I put it off all day. Most people find these things boring, tedious, irritating, even inflammatory, and I don't blame them. But if I didn't write my thoughts, who would?