This is sooo far from being the case…
When the Americans revolted against England, in England there was the state-established church, the Church of England. In the colonies, there were colonies which had their own government-established churches. The laws of the individual colonies ranged from requiring people to attend that church or pay a fine to legal indifference.
The First Amendment was that the *federal * government would be forbidden to establish a
national church over the states. It was a states’rights issue rather than a religious or individual’s rights issue.
In fact, many of the Founding Fathers were religious, and many believed that principles of this nation would endure only the citizens were religious and maintained a high degree of morality.
(a
thought-provoking article on the Catholic influence on the Founding Fathers)
In fact, many founding fathers weren’t religious.
John Adams, the country’s second president, was drawn to the study of law but faced pressure from his father to become a clergyman. He wrote that he found among the lawyers 'noble and gallant achievments" but among the clergy, the “pretended sanctity of some absolute dunces”. Late in life he wrote: "Twenty times in the course of my late reading, have I been upon the point of breaking out, “This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!”
It was during Adam’s administration that the Senate ratified the Treaty of Peace and Friendship, which states in Article XI that “the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion.”
Thomas Jefferson, third president and author of the Declaration of Independence, said:“I trust that there is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die a Unitarian.” He referred to the Revelation of St. John as “the ravings of a maniac” and wrote:
The Christian priesthood, finding the doctrines of Christ levelled to every understanding and too plain to need explanation, saw, in the mysticisms of Plato, materials with which they might build up an artificial system which might, from its indistinctness, admit everlasting controversy, give employment for their order, and introduce it to profit, power, and pre-eminence. The doctrines which flowed from the lips of Jesus himself are within the comprehension of a child; but thousands of volumes have not yet explained the Platonisms engrafted on them: and for this obvious reason that nonsense can never be explained."
James Madison, fourth president and father of the Constitution, was not religious in any conventional sense. “Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise.”
“During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.”
Benjamin Franklin, delegate to the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention, said:
As to Jesus of Nazareth, my Opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the System of Morals and his Religion…has received various corrupting Changes, and I have, with most of the present dissenters in England, some doubts as to his Divinity; tho’ it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the Truth with less trouble." He died a month later, and historians consider him, like so many great Americans of his time, to be a Deist, not a Christian.
That’s pretty wordy, but you get the idea. Also, some statistics of the religions of the Founding Fathers (in a more general sense than just the historical celebrities we know of)
Episcopalian/Anglican - 54.7% (88)
Presbyterian - 18.6% (30)
Congregationalist - 16.8% (27)
Quaker - 4.3% (7)
Catholic - 1.9% (3)
