Deist

A deist is defined as "deist - a person who believes that God created the universe and then abandoned it" with Deism being defined as "The belief that God has created the universe but remains apart from it and permits his creation to administer itself through natural laws."

I have heard people say the "Founding Fathers" were mostly deists.

A few prominent Founding Fathers were anti-clerical Christians such as Thomas Jefferson, who constructed the Jefferson Bible which contained everything Jesus said but cut out a lot of commentary.

Benjamin Franklin was another but while he had many illegitimate children by several women he saw to their raising and education. He had a perception of virtue and moral responsibility.

Thomas Paine challenged institutionalized religion in The Age of Reason'. He speaks of a Christian fraud and a neglect of the creator in the views of Christians. But his views and interpretations of the Bible were dependent upon what was posing as Christianity. He was said to be a deists yet he quoted the Bible extensively in his pamphlet Common Sense.

He drew from 1 Samuel 8 arguments against the Crown and tyranny but missed the purpose of the Church and the practice of Pure Religion which was to care for the widows and orphans by charity. Ironically he proposed later in life to create a tax by which government could provide for the old age of those who had no family to care for them.

Pain spoke of Deism and Religion, at least as the Quakers saw things.

"How different is this to the pure and simple profession of Deism! The true Deist has but one Deity, and his religion consists in contemplating the power, wisdom, and benignity of the Deity in his works, and in endeavoring to imitate him in everything moral, scientifical, and mechanical."

"The religion that approaches the nearest of all others to true Deism, in the moral and benign part thereof, is that professed by the Quakers; but they have contracted themselves too much, by leaving the works of God out of their system. Though I reverence their philanthropy, I cannot help smiling at the conceit, that if the taste of a Quaker could have been consulted at the creation, what a silent and drab-colored creation it would have been! Not a flower would have blossomed its gayeties, nor a bird been permitted to sing." AGE OF REASON by Thomas Paine, "TO MY FELLOW-CITIZENS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA"

"As to the Christian system of faith, it appears to me as a species of Atheism— a sort of religious denial of God. It professes to believe in a man rather than in God. It is a compound made up chiefly of Manism with but little Deism, and is as near to Atheism as twilight is to darkness. It introduces between man and his Maker an opaque body, which it calls a Redeemer, as the moon introduces her opaque self between the earth and the sun, and it produces by this means a religious, or an irreligious, eclipse of light. It has put the whole orbit of reason into shade." AGE OF REASON by Thomas Paine, "TO MY FELLOW-CITIZENS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA"

Clearly he missed the essence of Christ

, or held beliefs very similar to those of deists.

Historian Gregg L. Frazer argues that the leading Founders (Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, Wilson, Morris, Madison, Hamilton, and Washington) were neither Christians nor Deists, but rather supporters of a hybrid "theistic rationalism".