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Of the five founders, George Washington (1732–1799) had the least to say about religion. Like most members of the Virginia gentry, he was baptized, married, and buried in the Anglican (Episcopal) church. But he wore his denominational labels lightly and kept his private religion strictly private. “In politics as in religion,” he wrote in 1795, “my tenets are few and simple.”

As president for two terms, he did not altogether avoid the language of religion, but it was a public or civil religion that he addressed, doing so in a language that demonstrated no great passion. When he chose to speak of God, it was in terms like “the Grand Architect,” “the Governor of the Universe,” “the Supreme Dispenser of all Good,” “the Great Ruler of Events,” and even “the Higher Cause.” Nothing here suggested a warm or personal relationship.

Moreover, Washington studiously avoided referring to the person and ministry of Jesus. When in 1789 some Presbyterian leaders complained to Washington about the Constitution’s absence of any reference to “the only true God and Jesus Christ, whom he hath sent,” the nation’s first president calmly replied, “The path of true piety is so plain as to require but little political direction.”

Washington’s aloofness and broad tolerance added to his enormous appeal as the nation’s leader, but they leave us in the dark as to what he specifically believed about God.

Born in Braintree (Quincy), Massachusetts, John Adams (1735–1826) grew up in the sheltering fold of New England Congregationalism. But when many of those churches turned toward liberal Unitarianism, Adams turned with them. That movement, coupled with the Enlightenment (to which Adams in France was fully exposed) ensured that he also would become a freethinker.

Orthodoxy busied itself with theological and sectarian disputes, Adams observed, all of which weakened its impact and reduced its attractiveness. Modern priests, whether “popistical or Presbyterian,” demonstrated little tolerance and less charity. It was simply not the case and never would be, Adams fervently declared, that only Calvinists would get to heaven. These days every church, every sect, thinks that it alone has the “Holy Ghost in a phial [vial].”

On the other hand, John Adams extolled the sovereignty of God in language of deepest feeling. Whenever he spent any time thinking of the enormity and grandeur of the universe, the Milky Way, and the “stupendous orbits of the suns,” he said, “I feel an irresistible impulse to fall on my knees in adoration of the Power that moves, the Wisdom that directs, and the Benevolence that sanctifies this wonderful whole.” In acclaiming God’s greatness, Adams also recognized his—and humankind’s—finiteness. “Worm! Confine thyself to thy dust. Do thy duty in thy own sphere.”

That duty demanded adherence to high moral standards. One should not concentrate on metaphysical causes and effects but on attending to one’s own duties. “Be good fathers, sons, brothers, neighbors, friends, patriots, and philanthropists, good subjects and citizens of the universe, and trust the Ruler with his skies.” Religion must never allow itself to become an evasion of moral duty but only a compulsion to it.

For this reason, Adams impatiently dismissed the doctrine of original sin: “I am answerable enough for my own sins,” he wrote in 1815, because “I know they were my own fault, and that is enough for me to know.”

Regarding the age-old debate between free will and predestination, Adams hesitated not at all: “If there is no liberty, there is no responsibility. No virtue, no vice, no merit or demerit, no reward and no punishment.” And that made a mockery of all justice, human or divine.

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