The Cathedral Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul in Washington DC commonly referred to as Washington National Cathedral (Brian P. Irwin/Shutterstock.com).What about Franklin?
Benjamin Franklin proposed this depiction for the national seal in 1776.Scholars regularly assert that America’s Founders were deists who desired the strict separation of church and state.
Frank Lambert, for example, writes that “the significance of the Enlightenment and Deism for the birth of the American republic, and especially the relationship between church and state within it, can hardly be overstated.” Similarly, his fellow historian Richard Hughes claims “most of the American founders embraced some form of Deism, not historically orthodox Christianity.” Although many more examples could be given, I’ll close by quoting law professor Geoffrey R. Stone, who contends that “deistic beliefs played a central role in the framing of the American republic . . . . [The] founding generation viewed religion, and particularly religion’s relation to government, through an Enlightenment lens that was deeply skeptical of orthodox Christianity.”[1]
