Many scholars have firing debates about Founding Fathers’ Christian faith. Some historians said most of them were deists. However, it should be noted that, according to Mark David Hall, the professor of Politics at George Fox, “there is virtually no evidence that more than a handful of civic leaders in the Founding era—notably Benjamin Franklin, Ethan Allen, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and (if we count him as an American) Tom Paine—embraced anything approximating this view.” When the critics argued that the Founding Fathers should not be called Christians because they did not attend church, did not take communion, and attended un-christian-like war with Britain, Mark Hall asserted that, “In some cases, these critiques do not take into account historical context, such as the difficulty of joining Calvinist churches in 18th century America. …show more content…
If the standard of being a Christian is moral perfection, no one has ever been a Christian.” Critics generalized that all the Founders were deist just because of several contradictory religion practices that Founders made. However (in contradiction?), among the entire group of Founding Fathers, about 54.7% of the Founding Fathers were Anglicans, 18.6% of Presbyterians, and 16.8% of Congregationalists. Out of all the Founding Fathers, George Washington was in the center of the controversies, whose religious belief was vague and was quite with his faith. The most popular argument that skeptics made was that George Washington was deist because he never mentioned the name of Jesus Christ in private, and instead, he used the word such as “the Supreme Being”, “Providence”, “Author of the Universe”, etc. However, as a leader of America, George Washington commented in a way that he could appeal the diversity of religions.