Deism and Vedanta – Similarities.
America has been defrauded by one of the most persistent myths in its history: that it was founded as a Christian nation. No claim is more dishonest, more corrosive to reason, or more insulting to the intelligence of the very men who forged the Republic. The Founding Fathers, at their core, were deists—skeptics of revelation, opponents of priestly power, and enemies of dogma. To call them Bible-believers is to call Socrates a Pharisee or Spinoza a rabbi. It is historical nonsense and intellectual slander. Deism was America’s Vedānta, a creed that married reason to spiritual intuition, a creed that affirmed the divine not through miracles and myth but through natural law and universal order.
Thomas Jefferson is the starting point. His “Jefferson Bible” was not a Bible at all but a scalpel applied to superstition. With ruthless precision, he cut out every miracle, every virgin birth, every resurrection, every story that smacked of fable and priestly fraud. What remained was a slim text of ethics, stripped to the bone, a kind of Upanishad of Galilean morality. Jefferson’s Jesus was not the Christ of church creeds but a teacher of wisdom, a sage of moral reason, no different in kind from the Buddha or the rishis. In a letter to John Adams in 1823, Jefferson predicted with biting sarcasm: “The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus… will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.”¹ He was no Christian nationalist; he was a critic of revelation itself.
Then comes Thomas Paine, the fiercest of them all, who in The Age of Reason declared: “My own mind is my own church.”² Nothing could be closer to Vedānta’s insistence that the self is Brahman, that the divine is found not in temples or texts but in the very structure of reason and consciousness. Paine mocked revelation as hearsay, denounced miracles as absurdities, and exposed priestcraft as tyranny. “All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish,” he wrote, “appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.”³ He did not call for atheism but for a universal theism stripped of dogma. His God was the God of nature, not of synagogues or cathedrals, and his church was the mind liberated from superstition.
Benjamin Franklin, ever pragmatic, refused to bow before orthodoxy. “I soon became a thorough Deist,” he admitted in his *Autobiography.*⁴ Late in life, when pressed about his beliefs, he wrote to Ezra Stiles in 1790: “As to Jesus of Nazareth, I think his system of morals… the best the world ever saw, but… I have some doubts as to his divinity.”⁵ Franklin’s religion was experimental, curious, skeptical—a faith in reason and in the moral utility of virtue, not in creeds or sacraments.
George Washington, the most revered of them all, spoke constantly of “Providence,” but never of Jesus Christ. He attended church services as a matter of civic duty but refused to receive communion. In his letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport in 1790, Washington wrote the immortal words: “The Government of the United States… gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”⁶ His religion was one of public morality, not private dogma. Washington understood that the Republic required virtue, not miracles; discipline, not doctrine. His God was the God of natural order, a distant providence guiding liberty, not the tribal deity of sectarian squabbles.
Even John Adams, often painted as more conventionally religious, confessed his disdain for organized Christianity. He once wrote to Jefferson in 1817: “This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it.”⁷ And the Treaty of Tripoli, negotiated under Washington and signed by Adams in 1797, declared in its eleventh article: “The government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”⁸ That sentence, unanimously ratified by the Senate, ought to be carved into every courthouse in America as the Republic’s true creed.
The intellectual climate of the late eighteenth century was not one of revivalist Christianity, but rather one of Enlightenment skepticism. The First Amendment’s wall of separation between church and state is itself the most eloquent testimony to the triumph of deism. No founder—save the marginally influential Puritans and evangelicals—would have risked his life to establish a theocracy. They risked their lives to destroy it.
Now, when one places deism alongside Vedānta, the parallels are startling. The Upanishads ask whether God even exists, as in the Nasadiya Sukta of the Rig Veda: “Whence came creation? Perhaps He in the highest heaven knows—or perhaps He knows not.” This radical questioning is identical in spirit to Jefferson’s scissors and Paine’s laughter. The Vedāntic sage proclaims that truth is not handed down to a chosen few but discovered by reason and direct intuition. Deism, too, insists that truth must harmonize with nature and reason. Both traditions reject miracles. Both reject priestly monopoly. Both affirm universality. Both see the divine as an order of being rather than a despot in the sky.
To call America a Christian nation is to erase this intellectual lineage. It is to spit on the graves of men who risked damnation by the churches of their day to secure liberty. It is to forget that Jefferson was accused of atheism, that Paine was vilified as a blasphemer, that Franklin was mocked as a skeptic. The founders were not saints of Christendom. They were rebels against it.
Consider the practical fruits of their creed. Instead of a theology of sin and salvation, they gave us a Bill of Rights. Instead of dogma about heaven and hell, they gave us the secular Republic. Instead of an established church, they gave us freedom of conscience. This is political Vedānta: liberation through reason, liberty through the stripping away of illusion.
The cry of the Upanishads—“Lead me from darkness to light, from death to immortality”—finds its American echo in Paine’s “My mind is my church” and Jefferson’s “All men are created equal.” Both traditions aim to liberate humanity from ignorance, whether it is referred to as avidya or superstition. Both reject exclusivity. Both proclaim universality.
It is no accident that America, founded on deism, became the first nation in history to separate religion and politics so thoroughly. It was the culmination of Vedāntic reason in Western soil: a refusal to bow to revelation, a refusal to canonize miracles, a refusal to let priests dictate politics. The Founders knew that a republic could not survive if yoked to dogma. They chose reason.
That choice is under attack today by those who would resurrect the myth of a Christian America. But history is merciless. Jefferson’s scissors, Paine’s pen, Franklin’s wit, Washington’s silence, Adams’s contempt—all testify to the same truth: America was never a Christian nation. It was, at its birth, a deistic nation, a Vedāntic nation, a nation that chose reason over revelation, universality over dogma, freedom over theology.
To say otherwise is to betray the Republic. To say America is Christian is to turn the Enlightenment into a church service, to exchange liberty for catechism. The truth is sharper and nobler: America was founded by men who rejected revelation, who stripped religion down to reason, who created the world’s first modern republic on the bedrock not of theology but of freedom. That is America’s true inheritance. And it is closer to the Upanishads than to the Sermon on the Mount.
Notes / Citations
- Jefferson to John Adams, April 11, 1823.
- Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, Part I (1794).
- Ibid.
- Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography (1791, posthumous).
- Franklin to Ezra Stiles, March 9, 1790.
- George Washington to the Hebrew Congregation at Newport, August 18, 1790.
- John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, April 19, 1817.
- Treaty of Tripoli, Article XI, signed 1797.
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