Were our founding fathers Christians or Diests?

Some of both however many of the key members were Diests.

Thomas Paine

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of...Each of those churches accuse the other of unbelief; and for my own part, I disbelieve them all."

George Washington

The first president of the United States, never declared himself a Christian according to contemporary reports or in any of his voluminous correspondence. Washington Championed the cause of freedom from religious intolerance and compulsion. When John Murray (a universalist who denied the existence of hell) was invited to become an army chaplain, the other chaplains petitioned Washington for his dismissal. Instead, Washington gave him the appointment. On his deathbed, Washington uttered no words of a religious nature and did not call for a clergyman to be in attendance.

John Adams

The country's second president, was drawn to the study of law but faced pressure from his father to become a clergyman. He wrote that he found among the lawyers 'noble and gallant achievements" but among the clergy, the "pretended sanctity of some absolute dunces". Late in life he wrote: "Twenty times in the course of my late reading, have I been upon the point of breaking out, "This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!"

It was during Adam's administration that the Senate ratified the Treaty of Peace and Friendship, which states in Article XI that "the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion."

Thomas Jefferson

Third president and author of the Declaration of Independence, said:"I trust that there is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die a Unitarian." He referred to the Revelation of St. John as "the ravings of a maniac" and wrote:

The Christian priesthood, finding the doctrines of Christ levelled to every understanding and too plain to need explanation, saw, in the mysticisms of Plato, materials with which they might build up an artificial system which might, from its indistinctness, admit everlasting controversy, give employment for their order, and introduce it to profit, power, and pre-eminence. The doctrines which flowed from the lips of Jesus himself are within the comprehension of a child; but thousands of volumes have not yet explained the Platonisms engrafted on them: and for this obvious reason that nonsense can never be explained."

James Madison

The fourth president and father of the Constitution, was not religious in any conventional sense. "Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise."

"During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution."

Ethan Allen

Whose capture of Fort Ticonderoga while commanding the Green Mountain Boys helped inspire Congress and the country to pursue the War of Independence, said, "That Jesus Christ was not God is evidence from his own words." In the same book, Allen noted that he was generally "denominated a Deist, the reality of which I never disputed, being conscious that I am no Christian." When Allen married Fanny Buchanan, he stopped his own wedding ceremony when the judge asked him if he promised "to live with Fanny Buchanan agreeable to the laws of God." Allen refused to answer until the judge agreed that the God referred to was the God of Nature, and the laws those "written in the great book of nature."

Benjamin Franklin

Delegate to the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention, said:

As to Jesus of Nazareth, my Opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the System of Morals and his Religion...has received various corrupting Changes, and I have, with most of the present dissenters in England, some doubts as to his Divinity; tho' 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." He died a month later, and historians consider him, like so many great Americans of his time, to be a Deist, not a Christian.

Diest

The whole Deist thing is just one of those things that people began hear about then just accepted as fact. The majority of the founding fathers were in fact Christians, as many made references to very specific parts of Christianity, including Jesus Christ. (Some) Atheists seem to love to to use the Deist argument when it comes to the mixing of religion and politics/government, but they have no real ground for it.

Thomas Jefferson was the only person to have his own seat during the capitals Sunday church service, no matter the weather he always came riding up on his horse.

Hurricane hitting the capital he was there on a horse, a little snow and fools we have now can't make it in a heated car.

Thomas Jefferson believed in Christ, not Christianity. He felt Paul perverted the teachings of Christ.

As Long as no specific religion is established like Catholic, Jewish, Protestant, Buddhist, hinduism, Atheism, Satanism, or Muslim their is no establishment by the government. The establishment clause was put in because in resent events of their time they had seen different sects of the same religion go as far as putting people to death. Some of the deaths were even for something as stupid as which foot was on top when Christ was nailed to the cross.

Look at who speaks for God

In Christian mythology, God is supposed to the the all-powerful, all-knowing creator of the universe. God is supposed to have incarnated himself as Jesus and he is supposed to have written the Bible. And yet today God is completely and absolutely silent. Therefore, the only thing we hear from God comes from people who are speaking on his behalf.

If you would like to understand how imaginary God is, all that you have to do is listen to God's spokespeople, because in many cases these people are lunatics. If there actually were a God, and if he actually had anything to do with love, he would silence these people because they are an absolute embarrassment.

I'd say majority of the Founding Fathers were Christians, wholesome men who wanted to build our country on Christian fundamentals. A few of them, were Deists; in a nutshell, they thought that God created the world and left it abandoned, like a clockmaker who makes a watch and then sells it. Thomas Jefferson, notably, was a deist. It is said he had a copy of the Bible in which he blacked out every time Jesus referred to himself as God. He just didn't believe in that.

That is something that we will probably never know. Just as we don't know if our recent presidents were really christians or just political christians.

Some of each. There was at least 1 atheist

If I were alive at the time of the American Revolution I'd probably be treated as sub-human so their religion means squat to me. For the record they claimed to be Christians.