Faith of Our (Founding) Fathers

Fascinating Facts about America's Religious Heritage
   
 Many of the British North American colonies ... were settled in the seventeenth century by men and women, who, in the face of European persecution, refused to compromise passionately held religious convictions and fled Europe. The New England colonies, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland were conceived and established "as plantations of religion." Some settlers who arrived in these areas came for secular motives ... but the great majority left Europe to worship God in the way they believed to be correct.[14]
 
 " ... scholars now identify a high level of religious energy in the colonies after 1700. ... Figures on church attendance and church formation support these opinions. Between 1700 and 1740, an estimated 75 to 80 percent of the population attended churches, which were being built at a headlong pace.[14]
 
 The establishment of Protestant Christianity was one not only of law but also, and far more importantly, of culture. Protestant Christianity supplied the nation with its "system of values."[1]
  
 In 1776, 98% of the population was Protestant Christian, 1.8% Catholic Christian, and .2 of 1% Jewish. That means that 99.8% of the people in America in 1776 professed to be Christians.[2,11]
 
 Religion played a major role in the American Revolution by offering a moral sanction for opposition to the British - an assurance to the average American that revolution was justified in the sight of God.[14]
 
 Ministers served the American cause in many capacities during the Revolution: as military chaplains, as penmen for committees of correspondence, and as members of state legislatures, constitutional conventions and the national Congress. Some even took up arms, leading Continental troops in battle.[14]
 
 One of the great slogans of the American Revolution was "No King but King Jesus!"[2]
   
 The spiritual emphasis manifested so often by the Americans during the Revolution caused one Crown-appointed British governor to write to Great Britain complaining that: "If you ask an American who is his master, he'll tell you he has none. And he has no governor but Jesus Christ".[9]
 
 Most of the Founding Fathers were graduates of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, or Columbia, all of which in those days expressed Christian leanings and were considered Christian institutions of higher education.
 Harvard produced such men as John Adams, John Hancock, Elbridge Gerry, John Pickering, William Williams, Rufus King, William Hooper, William Ellery, Samuel Adams, and Robert Treat Paine.
 Yale's graduates included Oliver Wolcott, William Livingston, Lyman Hall, Lewis Morris, Jared Ingersoll, Phillip Livingston, and William Samuel Johnson.
 Princeton educated such men as John Witherspoon, James Madison, Richard Stockton, Benjamin Rush, Gunning Bedford, and Jonathan Dayton. 33% of the Founding Fathers were graduates of Princeton.[1]
 
 Of the 55 signers of the Declaration of Independence, 52 were Orthodox Christians.[13]
 
 In his 1833 work, A Moral and Political Sketch of the United States, Achille Murat said, "There is no country in which the people are so religious as in the United States; to the eyes of a foreigner they even appear to be too much so. The great number of religious societies existing in the United States is truly surprising: there are some of them to distribute the Bible; to distribute tracts; to encourage religious journals; to convert, civilize, educate the savages; to marry the preachers; to take care of their widows and orphans; to preach, extend, purify, preserve, reform the faith; to build chapels, endow congregations, support seminaries; catechize and convert sailors, Negroes, and loose women."[1]
 
 Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story (appointed by President James Madison) called America a "Christian country."[11]
 
 As late as 1850 Christians ran virtually every newspaper in this country. The law and the federal and local judiciaries were either all Christians or Jewish.[11]
 
 Donald S. Lutz and the late Charles S. Hyneman, historians at the University of Houston, did a 10-year study of the ideas that shaped our Republic. They started with 15,000 documents from the Colonial era, which were boiled down to 3,154 statements. The three most quoted individuals were French philosopher Montesquieu (8.3%), English jurist William Blackstone (7.9%) and English philosopher John Locke (2.9%). But Biblical citations dwarfed them all. Ninety-four percent of the founding fathers' quotes were based on the Bible — 34% directly from its pages and 60% from men who had used the Bible to arrive at their conclusions.[2,37]
   
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