The Faith of the Founders

One of America’s most important Founders was a man named Charles Thomson. He served as the secretary of the Continental Congress for fifteen years — from 1774 through 1789, the entire span of the Revolution and the founding of the federal government. He was the man who chose the final design of the Great Seal of the United States that now sits on the back of every dollar bill. He was said by his contemporaries to have been closer to the events and the men of the Revolution than any other person of his era. He kept a complete personal manuscript of what he had witnessed.

When friends and historians urged him to publish what he knew, Thomson refused. His answer is recorded for history: “No, I ought not, for I should contradict all the histories of the great events of the Revolution. Let the world admire the supposed wisdom and valor of our great men. I shall not undeceive future generations.” Then he destroyed the manuscript. The truest account of the American Revolution that ever existed was burned by the man who designed the Great Seal.

“I shall not undeceive future generations.”

We are the future generations Thomson refused to tell. This study is an attempt, two centuries later, to undeceive what he chose to leave deceived. It is built almost entirely on the Founders’ own letters, the testimonies of their own pastors, and the official documents of their own government. Nothing in it is speculation. The case it makes is the case the Founders themselves made about themselves — in their own words, when they thought no one was watching.

Why This Study Comes First

Almost every American Christian has been taught that the Founding Fathers were Christian men who founded a Christian nation on Christian principles. This teaching is false at nearly every level. It has been promoted in pulpits, homeschools, and political conferences for fifty years, most prominently by men like David Barton of WallBuilders, whose books and speaking tours have convinced a generation of believers that loving America and loving Yahuah are essentially the same act.

The other studies in this section walk through specific holidays, symbols, and structures — the Pledge of Allegiance, the dollar bill, July 4, the obelisk on the Mall, the apotheosis of Washington. Those studies show that the symbols of American civic religion are pagan in form and origin. But many readers, confronted with that evidence, will object: “The symbols may be pagan, but the men who built them were Christians who simply didn’t understand what they were borrowing.” That objection has to be addressed before the rest of the section can land. This study addresses it.

The men who built the United States of America were not Christians. Their own pastors said so. Their own letters said so. Their own ratified treaties said so. They were students of the European Enlightenment, devotees of human reason, members of secret fraternities, and — in the most decisive cases — open enemies of the gospel of Yahushua the Messiah. To know what their symbols mean, you have to know what they themselves believed. That is what this study lays out.

Thomas Paine: The Pen That Made the Revolution

The American Revolution did not begin with a battle. It began with a pamphlet. In January 1776, an Englishman named Thomas Paine published a pamphlet called Common Sense that argued openly for American independence from Britain. It sold an estimated 500,000 copies in a population of three million colonists — the proportional equivalent of fifty million copies in modern America. The Marquis de Lafayette later said, “A free America without her Thomas Paine is unthinkable.” John Adams said, “Without the pen of Paine, the sword of Washington would have been wielded in vain.” Both quotations are inscribed on Paine’s tombstone. The man’s grave declares: history is to ascribe the American Revolution to Thomas Paine.

Paine was brought to America by Benjamin Franklin, who met him in England, recognized his talent, and personally arranged his passage to Philadelphia. Within fourteen months of arriving, Paine had written and published Common Sense. Franklin was the printer. The pamphlet that lit the Revolution was, in every meaningful sense, a Franklin production with Paine as the writer. Paine also wrote The American Crisis, the series of essays read aloud by George Washington to his troops at Valley Forge. He coined the phrase “The United States of America.” He was, by his own contemporaries’ admission, the philosophical father of the Revolution.

The Age of Reason

Once the Revolution was won, Paine showed his hand. In 1794 he published The Age of Reason — the most direct attack on the Bible and on the gospel of Yahushua ever written by an American Founder. The book was a sensation, selling hundreds of thousands of copies, and made Paine’s real beliefs public. They were not Christian. They were not even quietly skeptical. They were openly hostile.

Thomas Paine, The Age of ReasonWhen I see throughout the greater part of this book — the Bible — scarcely anything but a history of the grossest vices and a collection of the most paltry and contemptible tales, I cannot dishonor my Creator by calling it by His name.

Thomas Paine, The Age of ReasonIt is the fable of Jesus Christ, as told in the New Testament, and the wild and visionary doctrine raised thereon, against which I contend.

Thomas Paine, The Age of ReasonWhat is it the New Testament teaches us? To believe that the Almighty committed debauchery with a woman engaged to be married, and the belief of this debauchery is called faith.

Paine called the Bible “the word of a demon” rather than the word of God. He called the virgin birth of the Messiah “blasphemously obscene.” He explicitly identified himself as contending against the gospel. He hoped The Age of Reason would help “abolish” Christianity. He wrote: “My own mind is my own church.” This is the man whose pen — by John Adams’ own admission — made the Revolution possible.

The Death-Bed Witnesses

Some Christian writers have claimed Paine repented before his death. He did not. The historical record is clear and well-documented. Paine’s biographers Moncure D. Conway and John E. Remsburg both record what happened. As death approached, Paine deliberately surrounded himself with witnesses precisely because he was afraid that some Christian visitor would later claim he had converted. He wanted his rejection of the gospel attested by multiple living people to the very last breath.

In one famous incident, an old woman came to his bedside and told him she had been sent by God to warn him that if he did not repent and believe in Christ, he would be damned. Paine’s response, recorded by Conway: “Poh, poh, it is not true. You are not sent with such an impertinent message. … God would not send such a foolish ugly old woman as you. Turn this messenger out.” In his last will and testament, Paine listed as one of his great contributions to the world a book demonstrating “that there are no prophecies” of Jesus Christ. According to Remsburg, there were some twenty death-bed witnesses, all affirming or admitting that Paine did not recant.

Paine and the Bavarian Illuminati

On May 1, 1776the same year as the Declaration of Independence — a Bavarian law professor named Adam Weishaupt founded the Order of the Illuminati. The 1776 founding date is preserved on the base of the unfinished pyramid on the back of every dollar bill, written as MDCCLXXVI. Most Americans assume the date refers only to the Declaration. Occult writers have long noted that it equally refers to the Illuminati.

Direct documentary evidence connects Thomas Paine to the Bavarian Illuminati through a man named Nicolas Bonneville. Bonneville was personally converted to Illuminism in Paris in June 1787 by Christian Bode, Weishaupt’s leading associate. Paine then lived with Bonneville and his wife in a ménage à trois arrangement from 1797 to 1802 — documented by Library of Congress historian Dr. James H. Billington in his book Fire in the Minds of Men. The man whose pen made the American Revolution shared a household for five years with a confirmed Illuminati convert. This is not a fringe theory; it is documented in the records of the Library of Congress.

“The pen that made the Revolution belonged to a man who called the Bible the word of a demon and roomed with a Bavarian Illuminati operative.”

George Washington: The Man His Own Pastors Doubted

George Washington is the most carefully manufactured Christian in American history. Paintings show him kneeling in prayer at Valley Forge. Sermons quote his references to “Providence.” David Barton’s books and tours present him as a model of Christian leadership. The historical record — the testimony of Washington’s own pastors and his own letters — tells a fundamentally different story.

He Refused Communion

Washington attended Christ Church in Philadelphia during his presidency. On every communion Sunday, his consistent practice was to stand up and walk out of the church just before the Lord’s Supper was administered. His step-granddaughter Nelly Custis confirmed it. His pastor confirmed it. Reverend James Abercrombie was so disturbed by the example Washington was setting for the congregation that he preached a sermon directly addressing it, stating from the pulpit “the unhappy tendency of example particularly of those in elevated stations who uniformly turn their backs on the celebration of the Lord’s supper.” Abercrombie’s own words about the result: “I acknowledge the remark was intended for the President; and as such he received it. … Accordingly, he never afterwards came on the morning of sacrament Sunday.”

Washington’s response to being publicly rebuked was not to start taking communion. It was to stop attending church on the days communion was offered. The man who supposedly led a Christian nation could not bring himself to participate in the central rite of the Christian faith. His own wife, Martha, took communion regularly. Washington had the carriage drop her off and bring her back. He stayed home.

Bishop White: “I Never Heard Anything”

Washington’s primary pastor for over twenty years was Bishop William White, the founding bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church in America and chaplain of the Continental Congress. When asked, late in life, whether he believed Washington was a Christian, White’s answer was unsparing:

Bishop William WhiteI do not believe that any degree of recollection will bring to my mind any fact which would prove General Washington to have been a believer in the Christian revelation, further than as may be hoped from his constant attendance upon Christian worship in connection with the general reserve of his character.

Bishop William WhiteHis behavior in church was always serious and attentive, but as your letter seems to intend an inquiry on the point of kneeling during the service, I owe it to the truth to declare that I never saw him in the said attitude. … Although I was often in company with this great man and had the honor of dining often at his table, I never heard anything from him which could manifest his opinions on the subject of religion.

His pastor of two decades never saw him kneel and never heard him express a Christian conviction. The famous painting of Washington kneeling in prayer at Valley Forge is, by his own pastor’s testimony, fiction.

Reverend Abercrombie: “Washington Was a Deist”

Reverend James Abercrombie, the pastor who had publicly rebuked Washington from the pulpit, was asked years later for his assessment of Washington’s faith. His answer was one sentence:

Reverend James AbercrombieSir, Washington was a Deist.

A Deist is someone who believes in a distant impersonal creator-god but rejects the divinity of Christ, the inspiration of Scripture, miracles, and divine revelation. It is the standard religious category for the Enlightenment thinkers of Washington’s generation. It is also fundamentally incompatible with biblical Christianity. The pastor who knew Washington best at a spiritual level identified him as exactly that.

The Philadelphia Clergy’s Plot

The most striking evidence comes from Dr. Ashbel Green, who served as Chaplain of Congress through the entire eight years of Washington’s presidency and dined with the President weekly. Green is the source for an extraordinary fact recorded in Thomas Jefferson’s personal diary: as Washington’s presidency neared its end, the clergy of Philadelphia met and conspired to force him into a public confession of Christ.

Thomas Jefferson, Diary, February 1, 1800Dr. Rush tells me that he had it from Asa Green, that when the clergy addressed General Washington on his departure from the government, it was observed in their consultation that he had never on any occasion said a word to the public which showed a belief in the Christian religion, and they thought they should so pen their address as to force him at length to declare publicly whether he was a Christian or not. They did so. However he observed, the old fox was too cunning for them. He answered every article in their address particularly except that, which he passed over without notice. … I know that Governor Morris has often told me that General Washington believed no more in the system of Christianity than he did.

Read that carefully. The Christian clergy of the capital city believed Washington was not a Christian. They knew it. They specifically engineered a public address designed to corner him into a confession of faith. He saw what they were doing. He answered every other article and “passed over” the question of his faith without comment. The same Christian clergy who lived through his presidency — men who knew him personally and saw him weekly — had to scheme to extract a confession of Christ from a President they were not sure had ever made one.

“The old fox was too cunning for them.”

Washington’s God: The Great Architect of the Universe

Washington’s own letters reveal the god he actually worshipped. When he wrote to his fellow Freemasons — to the lodges of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Virginia — he addressed his god by his Masonic name:

Washington to the Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania — Permit me to reciprocate your prayers and to supplicate that we may all meet hereafter in that eternal temple whose builder is the Great Architect of the Universe.

These letters can still be viewed today on the Library of Congress website in Washington’s own hand. The Great Architect of the Universe is the Masonic name for deity — a deliberately generic term designed so that Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Deists, and pantheists could all worship together in lodge without naming any specific god. It is the antithesis of the God of Scripture, who declared “This is my name for ever, and this is my memorial unto all generations” (Exodus 3:15). Washington was a Master Mason, took his presidential oath on a Masonic Bible borrowed from St. John’s Lodge No. 1 in New York, and laid the cornerstone of the U.S. Capitol in a full Masonic ceremony in 1793. He worshipped the god of the Lodge, not the God of the Bible.

In a letter to his fellow Mason Lafayette, Washington wrote openly: “Being no bigot myself to any mode of worship, I am disposed to indulge the professors of Christianity in the church that road to Heaven, which to them shall seem the most direct, plainest, easiest, and least liable to exception.” He addressed the Christians of his country as a tolerant outsider would address a religious minority. They were the “professors of Christianity.” He was something else.

Thomas Jefferson: The Editor of the Bible

Thomas Jefferson is the second of the Founders most often paraded as a Christian by modern apologists. His own letters annihilate the claim. Jefferson did not merely doubt Christianity. He worked actively against it for most of his adult life. He spent years personally cutting up the New Testament — with a razor — to remove every passage he considered a corruption.

The result was a document Jefferson titled The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, today known as “The Jefferson Bible.” It contains the moral sayings of Jesus and excludes every supernatural element: no virgin birth, no miracles, no resurrection, no ascension. Jefferson believed these were later corruptions added by inferior minds. He cut them out with a blade. The original is in the Smithsonian.

Jefferson to John AdamsIn the New Testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man and that other parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts as to pick out diamonds from dunghills.

Jefferson called the four Gospels a “dunghill” from which the moral sayings of Jesus had to be extracted like diamonds. He called the apostle Paul “the first corrupter of the doctrines of Jesus.” He called the disciples “dupes and impostors.” He described the Book of Revelation as “merely the ravings of a maniac, no more worthy nor capable of explanation than the incoherences of our own nightly dreams.”

The Hope That the Gospel Would Be Destroyed

In a letter to John Adams in 1823, Jefferson made his ultimate goal explicit:

Jefferson to Adams, April 11, 1823And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the Supreme Being as His Father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with all this artificial scaffolding.

Jefferson openly hoped that “these United States” would be the place where the gospel of the virgin birth and the resurrection would finally be destroyed. That is the man whose statue now stands in a Roman pantheon-style temple on the National Mall, whose face is on the nickel, whose words are quoted in pulpits as if scriptural. The author of the Declaration of Independence wanted the New Testament discredited and replaced by what he called “the dawn of reason.”

Late in life Jefferson advised his nephew Peter Carr on how to read the Bible. He did not encourage faith. He encouraged doubt. He told the young man to read the Gospels with “your reason firmly on the watch,” weighing the claim that Jesus “suspended and reversed the laws of nature at will” against the alternative claim that he was simply “a man of illegitimate birth” punished for sedition. That is what the author of the Declaration thought a young man should be taught about Yahushua the Messiah.

John Adams: The Unitarian Who Borrowed His Theology From Hindu Texts

John Adams, second President of the United States and a primary draftsman of the Declaration of Independence, was a confirmed Unitarian. Unitarianism explicitly rejects the doctrine of the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the personhood of the Holy Spirit, and the substitutionary atonement. Adams’s own letters describe his theology in detail, and they describe a faith that is not Christian by any meaningful definition.

Adams on the doctrine that Jesus is God — The Europeans are all deeply tainted with prejudices which they can never get rid of. They are all infected with creeds and confessions of faith. They all believe that great principle which has produced this boundless universe … came down to this little ball, to be spit upon by Jews. And until this awful blasphemy is got rid of, there never will be any liberal science in the world.

Adams called the central claim of the gospel — that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us — an “awful blasphemy” that needed to be “got rid of.” He believed that human civilization could not advance until the doctrine of the incarnation was destroyed. This is the man Christian writers cite as a defender of “Christian principles” in American government.

The Hindu Theology of John Adams

In his letters to Jefferson, Adams revealed where he actually drew his theology from. He pointed Jefferson to a Hindu sacred text:

Adams to Jefferson, December 25, 1813Where is to be found theology more orthodox or philosophy more profound than in the introduction to the Shasta? “God is one, creator of all, universal sphere, search not the essence and the nature of the Eternal, who is one. … The Eternal willed and he created Burma, Visna.” … These doctrines, sublime if ever there were any sublime, Pythagoras learned in India.

Adams praised the Hindu Shasta as the most orthodox theology he knew of. He approvingly quoted its lines about Brahma (Burma) and Vishnu (Visna). He believed Pythagoras learned proper theology in India and brought it back to Greece. The man whose statue is on dollar bill commemoratives and whose face is on stamps was, by his own pen, more comfortable with Hindu polytheism than with the gospel of the Messiah.

Adams to a critic — Ye will say I am no Christian. I say ye are no Christians, and there the account is balanced.

Adams himself acknowledged that orthodox Christians of his own day rejected him as a non-Christian. He responded by rejecting them. The two-hundred-year retroactive baptism of Adams as a defender of Christian government is performed by men who have either not read his letters or are deliberately misrepresenting them.

Benjamin Franklin: The Hellfire Club and the Final Letter

Benjamin Franklin was the only Founder to sign all four of the founding documents of the United States: the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Alliance with France, the Treaty of Paris ending the war, and the Constitution. He was also a Master Mason, served as Master of the Lodge of Philadelphia, and later became Master of the Lodge of the Nine Sisters in Paris — the lodge from which the French Revolution was launched. During his years in England, he was a member of an organization called the Hellfire Club, founded by Sir Francis Dashwood, a Member of Parliament and friend of Franklin.

The Hellfire Club

The Hellfire Club met at Medmenham Abbey on the Thames. Its purpose, at the most charitable reading, was to mock traditional Christianity through parody religious ceremonies and orgies. At the worst, it was accused of literal occult ritual. Over the front door of its hideaway was inscribed the phrase Fais ce que tu voudras — “Do what thou wilt” — the same phrase later adopted by the occultist Aleister Crowley as the central law of his Thelemic religion. Franklin’s membership is documented by Time magazine, the History Channel, and multiple academic biographies.

The Bones Beneath His House

On February 11, 1998, the Sunday Times of London reported that workmen restoring Franklin’s former London home at 36 Craven Street had discovered the remains of ten human bodies — four adults and six children — buried beneath the house. Animal bones were found alongside the human remains. The bones dated to the period when Franklin was living in the house. Most of the bones showed signs of having been dissected, sawn, or cut. One skull had been drilled with multiple holes.

The official explanation, accepted by the Benjamin Franklin House museum, is that the bodies were medical cadavers from an anatomy school run on the premises by Franklin’s friend Dr. William Hewson. That is possibly true. It is also true that the bodies were buried deep in the house — not given burial — in a manner the Times noted appeared designed to hide them. Whether they were medical specimens or something darker, the basic fact stands: ten dissected human bodies, six of them children, were buried beneath the home of the man whose face appears on the hundred-dollar bill. The official explanation is one possibility. It is not the only one.

The Final Letter

About one month before his death in 1790, Franklin received a letter from Ezra Stiles, the president of Yale, asking him directly what he believed about Yahushua the Messiah. Franklin’s reply is the closest thing to a death-bed confession of faith we have from him. It is not a confession. It is a refusal.

Franklin to Ezra Stiles, March 9, 1790As to Jesus of Nazareth, my opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the system of morals and his religion as he left them to us, the best the world ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupt changes, and I have, with most of the present Dissenters in England, some doubts as to his divinity. … 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.

One month from death, with eternity bearing down on him, Franklin acknowledged that he doubted the divinity of Yahushua and considered it “needless” to investigate the question. He preferred to wait and find out by direct experience. He never resolved the question on this side of the grave. The Scripture is unsparing about this posture: “He that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of Elohim abideth on him” (John 3:36). Franklin chose not to believe and not to investigate. The most accomplished American of his generation died doubting his Savior.

The Treaty of Tripoli: The Founders Said It Themselves

The single most decisive piece of evidence that the Founders did not believe they had founded a Christian nation is a treaty they ratified, in writing, with their own signatures, with no objection from a single member of the Senate. It is called the Treaty of Tripoli, signed in 1796 and ratified by the U.S. Senate on June 7, 1797, then signed into law by President John Adams.

The treaty was a peace agreement with the Muslim Barbary state of Tripoli, intended to end attacks on American merchant ships. The treaty was negotiated by Joel Barlow, a former Congregational minister, during George Washington’s presidency. Article 11 of that treaty contains one of the most extraordinary statements ever made in an official American government document:

Treaty of Tripoli, Article 11 (1797)As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion, — as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility of Musselmen [Muslims], — and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

“The government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion.” Those words appear in a treaty ratified unanimously by the United States Senate. Every senator voted yes. Not one objected. The treaty was published in the Philadelphia Gazette and in two New York newspapers. The Christian public could read it. There was no significant outcry. It is, by any honest reading, a sworn legal admission by the federal government — in the founding generation — that the United States was not founded as a Christian nation.

“Not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion. — The U.S. Senate, unanimous, 1797.”

Modern apologists like David Barton have spent decades trying to explain this treaty away — arguing that it was a diplomatic courtesy, that the Arabic version differs, that the phrase has been quoted out of context. None of those arguments change the basic fact: the United States Senate of 1797, full of men who had personally fought the Revolution and signed the Constitution, ratified a treaty that openly declared the federal government was not founded on the Christian religion. They believed it. They voted for it. They published it. If they had thought of themselves as founders of a Christian nation, they would not have signed.

Why No Christian Voice Objected

The obvious question is: why did no Christian senator stand up and object to Article 11? The answer is that the founding government had very few Christians in it to object. Dr. Bird Wilson, a Christian minister and historian who had spent years investigating the faith of the Founders, preached a famous sermon on this subject in 1831 — in living memory of the Revolution.

Dr. Bird Wilson, sermon, 1831The founders of our nation were nearly all Infidels. … When the war was over and the Independence of our country had been established, men of the same character did not consider their work as completed, until they had embodied their views in our written constitution. … The proceedings as published by Thompson [Charles Thomson], the secretary, show that the question was gravely debated whether God should be in the constitution or not, and after a solemn debate he was deliberately voted out of it. … Those who have been called to administer the government have not been men making any public profession of Christianity.

Read that and absorb what it means. A Christian minister in 1831, with access to the records of the Continental Congress, stated that God was “deliberately voted out” of the United States Constitution after a formal debate. This is not the testimony of a modern atheist trying to discredit America. This is the testimony of a Christian preacher in the founding generation, decades before David Barton was born, telling his congregation that the men who built the United States were “nearly all Infidels” and that the Constitution was deliberately written without Yahuah in it. The preachers of the founding generation did not believe the Founders were Christians. The first generation that did believe it was the generation that came after the eyewitnesses had died.

How the Modern Lie Was Built

Beginning in the 1980s, the most prominent advocate for the “Christian nation” thesis has been a Texas activist named David Barton, founder of an organization called WallBuilders. Barton has produced books, videos, and speaking tours arguing that the Founders were sincere Christians and that modern Christians have a religious obligation to engage in American political activism on the basis of that founding heritage. His method, examined carefully, is to present isolated quotations from the Founders — stripped of context — in which they appear to affirm Christianity.

The technique is identical to taking Barack Obama’s public statement to Pastor Rick Warren that “I believe Jesus Christ died for my sins and I am redeemed through him” and using that quote, alone, to prove that Obama was a defender of biblical Christianity — ignoring his actual record on every other matter. Future generations who only saw the quote, divorced from the man’s actual life, would conclude something dramatically different from the truth. That is exactly what Barton does with Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, and Washington. He pulls a quote about “Christian principles” or “the Author of all good” and presents it as though the man behind the quote believed the gospel. The full record of the man’s letters reveals that the man did not.

In one notorious presentation on the Glenn Beck program, Barton displayed a letter from John Adams to Benjamin Rush in which Adams writes that “the Holy Ghost carries on the whole Christian system,” presenting it to viewers as proof that Adams was a Trinitarian Christian. The trick was that Adams was being sarcastic. The full context of the letter — which Barton omitted — reveals that Adams was mocking the Christian doctrine of the Holy Spirit, calling it “artifice and cunning” and a “desperate and impractical project to undeceive” the deluded Christians who believed it. Barton showed the affirmation. He hid the mockery that surrounded it.

This is not historical scholarship. It is religious propaganda. And the consequence has been to entangle two generations of American Christians in a political project that the Founders themselves would have found absurd — the project of “restoring” a Christian America that was never Christian to begin with.

What the Scripture Calls These Men

2 Timothy 3:1–5This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come. For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy … having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away.

Paul’s description fits the founding generation with painful precision. They had a form of godliness — references to Providence, the language of religious liberty, the borrowed vocabulary of “natural law” — but they denied the power. They denied the divinity of Yahushua. They denied the inspiration of Scripture. They denied the Trinity. They denied miracles. They denied the resurrection. They denied the gospel itself. And the apostle’s instruction concerning men of this description is simple and unmistakable: from such turn away.

1 John 2:22–23Who is a liar but he that denieth that Yahushua is the Messiah? He is antichrist, that denieth the Father and the Son. Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father.

2 John 7For many deceivers are entered into the world, who confess not that Yahushua the Messiah is come in the flesh. This is a deceiver and an antichrist.

By the apostle John’s definition, Thomas Painewho explicitly contended against “the fable of Jesus Christ” — was an antichrist. Thomas Jefferson, who hoped “these United States” would be where the gospel was finally destroyed, was an antichrist. John Adams, who called the incarnation an “awful blasphemy” that needed to be “got rid of,” was an antichrist. Benjamin Franklin, who died doubting the divinity of the Messiah and considered it “needless” to investigate, fell under the same condemnation. George Washington, whose own pastors testified he never confessed Christ and who worshipped the god of the Lodge, did not have the Father because he had not confessed the Son.

These are the men whose statues stand in the temples of Washington DC. These are the men whose faces are on the currency. These are the men quoted from American pulpits as if they were elders of the church. They were not. They were the philosophical and political agents of the same Enlightenment movement that produced the French Revolution’s Goddess of Reason and the bloodbaths of the Reign of Terror. They were brilliant, accomplished, courageous men who walked as giants on the earth. They were also, by the apostle’s definition, deceivers and antichrists.

What This Means for the Believer

Salvation is first and only through Yahushua the Messiah. Knowing the truth about the Founders does not save anyone, and refusing to honor them does not earn anyone’s salvation. But once a person has been redeemed by the blood of the Lamb and called to walk in the Torah of Yahuah, the question of who built the country we live in becomes a question with consequences. We are commanded to come out of Babylon. We cannot do that while still believing that the architects of Babylon were our brothers in the faith.

The other studies in this section walk through the holidays, the symbols, the architecture, and the rituals of American civic religion. Each one shows a specific element of pagan worship preserved in American national life. The reader who has finished this study has the foundation needed to make sense of all the rest. The men who built it were not Christians. The pen that started the Revolution called the Bible the word of a demon. The General who led the army worshipped the Great Architect of the Lodge. The President who drafted the Declaration cut the miracles out of the Bible with a razor. The President who succeeded him called the incarnation an awful blasphemy. The man on the hundred-dollar bill belonged to the Hellfire Club. The Senate of 1797 declared in writing that the government was not founded on the Christian religion. None of this is conspiracy. All of it is in their own letters and their own ratified documents.

Charles Thomson chose not to undeceive future generations. We are the future generation. We owe it to Yahuah and to one another to undeceive ourselves. The American civic religion is not Christianity. The American Founders were not the apostles. The faith we have been called to is older, deeper, and far more demanding than the patriotism we were raised on. It is the faith of Abraham, who left his country. It is the faith of Yahushua, who said his kingdom is not of this world. It is the faith that comes out of Babylon when she is recognized for what she is.

Revelation 18:4Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues.

Come out of her, my people.