I’m almost tempted to agree Jim, except that Evangelical Christianity in the USA has very little to do with actual Christianity besides the name – its interpretation of previous iterations of Christian teaching is almost unrecognisable, and it’s morphing into a pernicious moral disease that’s dividing society.

I disagree that evangelism is threatened though – I think that it is alive and well in the USA, and another four years or Trump would set the hook for a generation.

I have read a number of books written for general audiences on the period but have not made any special study of American Colonial times and the American Revolution or read any original sources so I am in no position to argue strongly against your position. In fact, I may be quite wrong in my position.

I thought though that I had made it clear that I thought the Founding Fathers were taking a pragmatic approach to mounting a revolution and saying and doing things for those reasons — propagandizing in order to marshal support. I did not say or mean that they had no other motivations. I am old enough to be aware that peoples’ higher values are often compromised by more practical considerations, including the economic.

So, just as a comment I offer the following:
(1) Despite whatever economic incentives they may have had, it seems to be the fact that the Founding Fathers were risking their lives in fomenting a revolution. I’ve read a fair amount of UK history and have found no indication that English governments had a record of mercy in such matters at the time. That to me argues for more than a simple economic interest; higher motives perhaps.
(2) The American revolutionaries not only needed to stir up a large number of colonists in their favor to have any chance of success, but also needed the support of foreign nations, specifically those which self-identified as Christian nations (for various practical reasons if nothing else). I should think that republicanism would be a hard enough sell to countries ruled by monarchs; “godless” republicanism would not sell at all. Hence a lot of talk about God. Didn’t Ethan Allen order the surrender of Fort Ticonderoga “in the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress”? Not a Founding Father but a sign of the times perhaps.

I would argue something very different about their motivations and justifications.

There were two kinds of “patriots” (layers, really). The wealthy who had been involved in extensive land speculation in the west that the British were interfering with significantly, and the common folk who were involved in the other end of that fight, seeing their rightful property and opportunity being taken away by, or threatened by, Native Americans, the French, etc. and in some cases, probably seen some threat to slavery from the British as well.

The rabble carried out heinous acts such as tarring and feathering loyalists, finding caches of pro-British documents and burning them, even killing some Tories. The upper class, the “founding father” group, had to lower their idyllic views and reshape their investment-protection schemes to line up with the rabble, to get them to fight.

And there was more than just that.

But between all those things, I don’t see any kind of belief in higher purpose or higher authority playing any real role in the actual on the ground activities that are fairly well documented across the colonies over several years leading up to the actual war, during the entire thing, and during the subsequent constitutional phase. It just isn’t there in the documents in any substantial way. It isn’t what people were saying, or fighting about. And they were talking!

At least that seems a reasonable position to me.

Trying to ascribe some divine origin for one’s morality is a suspect exercise at any rate- keep going back in history and “your god” will have been merely an appropriation of some one else’ s previous “god” [and don’t even get me started on all the convenient sherry picking evangelicals do with their own avowed “word of God” sheesh….

I would encourage people to read the full texts.
It may be difficult to argue that the excerpts are not proper summaries of the thoughts being expressed.

https://www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/quotations-jefferson-memorial

Chris/Tyvor, Have you read the quotes that are etched in stone at the Jefferson Memorial? https://tinyurl.com/yc9cfmwh

Northeast Portico

“God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that His justice cannot sleep forever. Commerce between master and slave is despotism. Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free. Establish the law for educating the common people. This it is the business of the state to effect and on a general plan.”

-Excerpted from multiple sources: “A Summary View of the Rights of British America,” “Notes on the State of Virginia,” “The Autobiography,” letter to George Wythe (1790), letter to George Washington (1786).