Pastor Robert Jeffress, speaking at the Trump administration’s May 17, 2026, “Rededicate 250: National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving” event on the National Mall, told the crowd that the Founding Fathers “would be called Christian nationalists today” and that it is “a title they would have gladly embraced.”
Jeffress is right that faith mattered deeply to many of the Founders — they were not a godless bunch, and pretending otherwise is its own kind of bad history. But the specific claim that they would embrace the label “Christian nationalist” gets the historical record almost exactly backwards. The most influential Founders — Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, and Adams — spent their careers fighting against the very thing Christian nationalism describes: the fusion of government authority with a particular Christian identity. Their own words, their own laws, and their own religious lives tell a story Jeffress isn’t telling. Assistance from Claude AI.
Analysis
Let’s start with what is true. Religion was woven into early American public life. The Continental Congress declared days of fasting and prayer (Library of Congress, 1998). Some Founders, including George Washington, wrote approvingly of Providence and God’s hand in the nation’s founding. Washington, Madison, and Hamilton are not on record rejecting orthodox Christianity (Hall, 2017). Faith — or at least the language of faith — was part of how the founding generation understood history and civic duty.
So Jeffress isn’t making everything up. He’s cherry-picking.
Here is what he leaves out. The Founders most responsible for designing the actual structure of American religious freedom were not orthodox evangelical Christians, and they worked hard to keep government and religion separated — not because they hated God, but because they believed both church and state were corrupted when you combined them.
Thomas Jefferson is the clearest case. Jefferson was what historians call a “Christian Deist” — he admired Jesus as a moral teacher but rejected the Virgin Birth, the Trinity, the Resurrection, and miracles (PBS American Experience, 2019). As president, he literally took a razor blade to his Bible, cutting out every miracle and keeping only the ethical teachings. He declined to proclaim national days of prayer and thanksgiving. And in 1802, he wrote to the Danbury Baptist Association that the First Amendment erected “a wall of separation between Church and State” (Jefferson, 1802). That phrase is not the invention of liberal activists — it came from Jefferson himself, writing in his own hand, to a group of Baptist Christians who were asking him to protect their religious liberty from government interference.
James Madison, the man most responsible for the actual text of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, was, if anything, even more aggressive on this point. In 1785, when Virginia was considering a bill to provide government funding for Christian teachers, Madison wrote his “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments,” laying out fifteen reasons why government should never support any religion (Center for American Progress, 2023). He and Jefferson then co-authored the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which became the model for the First Amendment. Madison was not opposed to religion — he was opposed to government power over religion, which is precisely what Christian nationalism would require.
Benjamin Franklin was raised Puritan, wandered into and largely out of Deism, but by his later life was skeptical of orthodox Christian doctrine. He used the language of God and providence because it was the public language of his time (STR, 2013). John Adams explicitly rejected the Trinity and, by his later years, had more in common with Unitarianism than evangelical Christianity (Britannica, 2025).
The Library of Congress’s own historical analysis of the founding period notes that Deism and “liberal religion” — which “stressed morality and questioned the divinity of Christ” — found their most prominent advocates among “upper class Americans, conspicuous among whom were Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Ben Franklin” (Library of Congress, 1998).
More importantly, the term “Christian nationalism” as used today does not simply mean that a leader loves Jesus and loves America. It describes a political ideology that treats Christian identity as foundational to American national identity — that America is, by definition, a Christian nation, and that government should reflect and enforce that identity. That is exactly what Jefferson’s Virginia Statute, Madison’s Memorial and Remonstrance, and the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause were written to prevent. Those documents did not emerge from a vacuum. They were written by men who had watched state-sponsored religion crush religious minorities throughout history and in their own lifetimes, and who were determined not to repeat it (Americans United, 2026).
The Constitution that the Founders wrote contains no reference to Jesus Christ, Christianity, or the Bible. Article VI explicitly bans religious tests for public office. The First Amendment opens with a prohibition on government establishment of religion. These were not accidents.
Overgeneralization
Jeffress treats “the Founders” as a unified bloc who all shared his theological commitments. They didn’t. The founding generation included orthodox Anglicans, Presbyterians, Deists, Unitarians, skeptics, and everything in between. Claiming they would all “gladly embrace” a modern political label is the kind of move a good attorney would call speculation — and a good historian would call revisionism. Even historian John Fea, who acknowledges that religion played a real role in the founding, cautions that “you can also find things that kind of suggest that they didn’t want to necessarily create a distinctly Christian nation, too,” pointing to the First Amendment, the separation of church and state, and the Enlightenment’s influence on the Founders (Deseret News, 2026).
You don’t have to believe a false version of history to love your faith and love your country. Jefferson and Madison weren’t trying to push Christianity out of American life — they were trying to protect it from being co-opted by political power, which, as every church historian knows, has never been good for the church. The most powerful moments of Christian revival in American history happened under the same First Amendment that separated church from state. If the Founders had a message for this moment, it might be: your faith is strong enough to stand on its own. It doesn’t need a government event to prop it up.
Sources
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Hall, M. D. (2017, November). Faith of our founders: The role of religion in America’s founding. The Imaginative Conservative. https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2017/11/faith-founders-role-religion-americas-founding-mark-david-hall.html
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Jefferson, T. (1802, January 1). Letter to the Danbury Baptist Association. Teaching American History. https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/letter-to-the-danbury-baptist-association/
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Library of Congress. (1998, May). Faith of our forefathers. Library of Congress Information Bulletin. https://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/9805/religion.html
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PBS American Experience. (2019). People and ideas: Early America’s formation. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/godinamerica-early-america-formation/
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Britannica. (2025). The Founding Fathers, Deism, and Christianity. Encyclopaedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Founding-Fathers-Deism-and-Christianity-1272214
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Center for American Progress. (2023, July 3). The Founding Fathers’ religious wisdom. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-founding-fathers-religious-wisdom/
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STR (Stand to Reason). (2013, February 28). The faith of our fathers. https://www.str.org/w/the-faith-of-our-fathers
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Americans United for Separation of Church and State. (2026, May). Americans United denounces Trump’s ‘National Jubilee of Prayer’ as Christian nationalism. https://www.au.org/the-latest/press/americans-united-denounces-trumps-national-jubilee-of-prayer-as-christian-nationalism/
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Fea, J. (as quoted in). (2026, May 16). As Trump hosts a national prayer jubilee on Sunday, Americans are divided over faith’s role in public life. Deseret News. https://www.deseret.com/faith/2026/05/16/prayer-sunday-national-mall-pew-research-center/
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MS Now. (2026, May 17). Speaker Mike Johnson rejects “this new term Christian nationalism” as “derogatory.” https://www.ms.now/news/mike-johnson-rejects-new-term-christian-nationalism-as-derogatory