Tag: the Body of Christ

Deism had become a trendy belief system on our land circa 1725, grew to dominance for many decades, and then finally declined in the early 1800s. Benjamin Franklin was born in 1706, so before his twentieth birthday, Deism would have been the new, fashionable, and intellectual faith for up-and-coming politicians. George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Paine were born in the 1730s, followed by Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, and James Madison in the ’40s and ’50s. These men established their education under the influence of major universities and Deist professors in preparation for US leadership; Washington was the exception, as his education was primarily through observation of aristocratic and wealthy dealings among the Virginia high class—most of which were openly Deist. Much documentation suggests that these men were all Deists as a result of cultural exposure during the Age of Reason (the Enlightenment era), but there are several choice documents and letters that suggest something far more bizarre than mere Deism was bubbling underneath the polished exterior for at least some of these men.

Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine is known for his heavy influence in the American Revolution. His tractCommon Sense, according to historians, proved to inspire the writing of the Declaration of Independence. His Crisis pamphlets were read aloud during the wartime era by George Washington to the troops. The memory of this man’s role in our country’s freedom, as stated on his very gravestone, reads: “On this site was buried Thomas Paine, 1737–1809, Author of Common Sense, the pamphlet that stirred American colonies to independence. John Adams said: ‘Without the pen of Paine, the sword of Washington would have been wielded in vain,’ and ‘History is to ascribe the American Revolution to Thomas Paine.’” Paine’s role as a founding father may be more overlooked than some, but it is certainly solid. So, was he a Christian?

Consider what he wrote in his The Age of Reason; Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology:

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. My own mind is my own church.

All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.…

Each of those churches show certain books, which they call revelation, or the word of God. The Jews say, that their word of God was given by God to Moses, face to face; the Christians say, that their word of God came by divine inspiration: and the Turks say, that their word of God (the Koran) was brought by an angel from Heaven. Each of those churches accuse the other of unbelief; and for my own part, I disbelieve them all.…

When Moses told the children of Israel that he received the two tables of the commandments from the hands of God, they were not obliged to believe him, because they had no other authority for it than his telling them so; and I have no other authority for it than some historian telling me so. The commandments carry no internal evidence of divinity with them; they contain some good moral precepts, such as any man qualified to be a lawgiver, or a legislator, could produce himself, without having recourse to supernatural intervention.^[i]

This view is similar to those shared by others of the founding fathers. If one were to research these men at length, they would find that they all were quoted as having appreciated the morality upheld within Christianity. But men like Paine no more belonged to the Body of Christ in his appreciativeness toward it than a Christian would be a Buddhist based on his or her appreciation of philosophy. Paine went on to address quite openly the faults he found in such concepts as the virgin birth of Christ, His resurrection, and His ascension, accepting only the probability of His death on the cross as a finite human man who lived among the Jews at one point in history. His open refutation of Christianity’s core doctrines goes much deeper still than this. Unabashedly, he writes that the Old Testament itself, and all the content therein, is “scarcely anything but a history of the grossest vices and a collection of the most paltry and contemptible tales.”^[ii] Moving on to his personal grievances of the New Testament, Paine even postulates that the Holy Spirit’s impregnation of Mary was equivalent to any other scandalous, premarital act between a male suitor and a betrothed woman when he says, “What is it the Testament teaches us?—to believe that the Almighty committed debauchery with a woman engaged to be married, and the belief of this debauchery is called faith.”^[iii] His summary of this “blasphemously obscene” belief system is as follows:

It is not the existence, or non-existence, of the persons [Jesus, Mary, and Joseph] that I trouble myself about; it is the fable of Jesus Christ, as told in the New Testament, and the wild and visionary doctrine raised thereon, against which I contend. The story, taking it as it is told, is blasphemously obscene. It gives an account of a young woman engaged to be married, and while under this engagement she is, to speak plain language, debauched by a ghost, under the impious pretence (Luke, chap. i., ver. 35), that “the Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee.” Notwithstanding which, Joseph afterward marries her, cohabits with her as his wife, and in his turn rivals the ghost. This is putting the story into intelligible language, and when told in this manner, there is not a priest but must be ashamed to own it.^[iv]

His final sentence here, in modern English, can be reworded: “Any priest or pastor willing to preach the heresy of Jesus Christ as the Son of God should be ashamed of himself.”

Needless to say, Thomas Paine—the forefather to whom the victory of the American Revolution has been repeatedly bestowed upon—was not a Christian. He was a Deist, and a radical one. According to the textbook, The Faiths of the Founding Fathers, “Thomas Paine, [a member of the Deism] movement’s radical wing viewed Christianity as a barrier to moral improvement and to social justice.”^[v]

Thomas Jefferson

Well-known founding father and celebrated signer of the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson, likewise had limited beliefs in Jesus Christ and His purpose upon the earth. Revelation 22:19 says, “And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book.” Jefferson was not concerned about this severe threat or its eternal implications when he used a razor blade to maim the Holy Bible, cutting choice teachings from the four Gospels and gluing them into a more so-called enlightened document popularly known as the “Jefferson Bible” (formally known as The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth). Jefferson’s cuts removed all of Christ’s miracles, all of His divinity as the Son, and most mention of the supernatural. The purpose of this, he says, was to purify Christ’s role and teachings from what the “priests” had corrupted throughout time. In a letter written to John Adams in 1813, Jefferson explained:

In extracting the pure principles which he [Christ] taught, we should have to strip off the artificial vestments in which they have been muffled by priests, who have travestied them into various forms, as instruments of riches and power to themselves. We must dismiss the Platonists and Plotinists, the Stagyrites and Gamalielites, the Eclectics, the Gnostics and Scholastics, their essences and emanations, their logos and demiurges, aeons and daemons, male and female, with a long train of etc., etc., etc., or, shall I say at once, of nonsense. We must reduce our volume to the simple evangelists, select, even from them, the very words only of Jesus, paring off the amphibologisms into which they have been led, by forgetting often, or not understanding, what had fallen from him, by giving their own misconceptions as his dicta, and expressing unintelligibly for others what they had not understood themselves. There will be found remaining the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man. I have performed this operation for my own use, by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book, and arranging the matter which is evidently his, and which is as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill. The result is an 8vo [Latin octavo—meaning one eighth the length of the original printed format] of forty-six pages, of pure and unsophisticated doctrines.^[vi]

But Jefferson shredded the Bible apart to create this “improved” gospel—one spared of all the “dunghills” such as Christ’s virgin birth and supernatural worth—without even the slightest inkling of fear that the “book of life” promise in Revelation would apply to his name. This is due to the fact that Jefferson didn’t even begin to respect the book of Revelation to begin with, as he said to Alexander Smyth in a letter dated January 17, 1825: “It is between fifty and sixty years since I read it [the Book of Revelation] and I then considered it as merely the ravings of a maniac, no more worthy nor capable of explanation than the incoherences of our own nightly dreams.”^[vii] This sentiment was penned a short number of years after he stated in his letter to William Short in 1819:

But the greatest of all the Reformers of the depraved religion of his own country, was Jesus of Nazareth. Abstracting what is really his from the rubbish in which it is buried, easily distinguished by it’s lustre from the dross of his biographers, and as separable from that as the diamond from the dung hill, we have the outlines of a system of the most sublime morality which has ever fallen from the lips of man: outlines which it is lamentable he did not live to fill up.^[viii]

Similar to his cutting apart of the New Testament, Jefferson believed that only parts of the Old Testament were of any value whatsoever. In a letter to Adams on January 24, 1814, he poses a question of the Ten Commandments’ origin, saying that even though legend postulates they were written with the finger of God, we only have Moses’ testimony to believe such a thing, and that we all have equal rights to doubt their authenticity. So, like Paine, Jefferson appreciated the morality as taught by a finite and human Jesus, but there exists plenty of evidence that Jefferson was no more a Christian man than any other Deist philosopher.

Benjamin Franklin

Another commonly known Deist, Benjamin Franklin, was a great supporter of freedom from England. It was through his career in printing early on that the writings of Thomas Paine found their way into the troops during war time and fed their hunger for a life outside England’s dictatorial rule. But in addition to the wonderful deeds he carried out in the interest of our land of liberty and justice, Franklin was heavily involved in secret societies throughout our home region as well as France and England. In the scholarly journal article, “The Masonic Chronology of Benjamin Franklin,” we read that “the Masonic career of Benjamin Franklin extends over a period of almost sixty years, during which time he was accorded the highest Masonic honors at home and abroad.”^[ix]

Philadelphia’s St. John’s Masonic Lodge (the first Masonic building in America where Franklin penned the society’s bylaws) awarded him with the title of Master Freemason during the same era he was elected Vénérable Maître W. M. (English “Worshipful Master”) at the Loge des IX Soeurs de Paris (“Nine Sisters Lodge of Paris”; it was at this location he assisted in the initiation of famous French enlightenment writer François-Marie Arouet—a.k.a. “Voltaire”—in 1778 just months before Franklin officiated Voltaire’s Masonic funeral amidst the brethren the same year). In the summer of 1734, he printed and published his Mason Book, which was the very first Masonic book printed in our country—and this act was carried out only a month after he had achieved the rank of “Grand Master of Pennsylvania.”^[x] (Later in 1749, he was appointed the “Provincial Grand Master of Pennsylvania by Thomas Oxnard of Boston.”^[xi]) During his American administration, the State House (Independence Hall) was built, and he and the brethren of St. John’s Lodge laid the cornerstone.^[xii] According to the recorded minutes in the proceedings of the Grand Masonic Lodge of the Crown & Anchor building of London in 1760, Franklin was listed as “Provincial Grand Master.”^[xiii] His death in 1790 is documented as passing “to the Grand Lodge beyond,” and his tombstone in Christ Church Yard of Pennsylvania would be a sacred gathering site for future Masonic services held in his honor.^[xiv]

Not only was Franklin a founding father of our country, he was a founding father of our country’s Freemasonry roots. It’s nearly unthinkable that we would have established such fervor for Freemasonry on our soil without him.

Yet, Franklin’s personal dirty laundry list goes deep. In order to understand just how deep, we have to visit some facts about the “Hellfire Club” of Sir Francis Dashwood. (It was men like Dashwood, along with their anything-goes lifestyles resulting in extreme corruption of character and terrible decision-making, who heralded from the enlightenment Age of Reason to which these founding fathers belonged.)

Dashwood was the founder of the “Order of the Friars of St. Francis of Wycombe,” later appropriately coined the Hellfire Club. Several full-length films have been made on this subject. Membership to Dashwood’s Hellfire Club (and many others like it during this time) was made up of some of the most prominent names in the British—and soon American—government, as well as jovial buddies from the upper-crust society. The club’s first meeting was conducted on Walpurgisnacht (German “Walpurgis Night,” so named after the venerated eighth-century abbess St. Walpurga), April 30, 1752. The alternate and popularly used title Hexennacht literally translates “Witch’s Night.” The Germanic origins trace to the night when witches gather on the Brocken, the pinnacle of the Harz Mountains in Northern Germany, to await the heralding springtime (though this evening is observed in several countries throughout the world not limited to Germany). The scene of witches and warlocks interacting with the devil on the Brocken for his favor has been revered over and over again through the play adaptation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust!—and from many reports historically, those scenes are not entirely a work of fiction. Many documents attest to the wicked revelries that occur on Walpurgisnacht, including, but not limited to, fantastic orgies and demonic human or animal sacrifices to Satan as trade for his power and blessing.

Those who wish to fend off or scare away the witches partake in many protection rituals and customs (varying from country to country, but frequently involving bonfires in some way or other). Some tales involve a kind of unholy Passover event whereupon all stables and barns must be locked up with crosses on the doorposts alongside tacked sprigs of juniper and elder (sacred to pagan deities), and holy bells are placed around the necks of cows, lest the parading witches of Brocken capture the livestock and deliver them to their own horrific devices. Over the years, much like Halloween in the States, most of the original rituals and customs have been replaced with modern parties and fun bonfires where people by the score gather to drink beer, socialize, and eat fattening treats. But from one culture to another, today, the evening of Walpurgisnacht is an invitation for rebel youth to vandalize neighbors’ property and wreak havoc throughout the area with a tongue-in-cheek blame placed on those wily Brocken witches of yesteryear.

In 1752, it was no coincidence that Sir Francis Dashwood chose to launch his Hellfire Club on a date well known for sexual orgies, fiery sacrifices, and deals with the devil. Much like some of the acts carried out by revelers who observe Walpurgisnacht, Dashwood organized his club to partake in debauchery fitting the motto in stained glass above the grand entrance of one of his later meeting sites—Fais ce que tu voudras (“Do what you will” or “Do what thou wilt”)—essentially encouraging all members to drink deeply from the cup of wantonness and shameless iniquity for the duration of their gathering. (This motto was interestingly adopted later as a lifestyle mantra by Aleister Crowley, a Rosicrucian and 33rd-Degree Freemason, also popularly known as “the wickedest man in the world.”)

Once the meetings were established in the Medmenham Abbey, décor was raised within depicting phallic artwork and structures, as well as mythological imagery. Caves underground at the site were also decorated accordingly. These caves are known as the “Hellfire Caves,” and they still exist to this day. Although merriment was conducted in the main hall, when the men wished to indulge in gaieties so immoral that it would have jeopardized their standing as upright politicians and “Christian” aristocrats, the parties were taken underground. Women prostitutes dressed as nuns would attend and offer their “holy services” to the present “monks,” and the orgies would begin.

Not limited to mere orgies and drunkenness were these meetings, however. Blatant blasphemy and mock religious rituals for the appeasement of pagan deities was the norm. (More than one of the movies made about this club of men involves mock human sacrifices, one of which in 1961 depicted the act taking place under a Baphomet symbol.) It is said that Dashwood used a sacred Eucharist cup to pour anointings upon pagan altars and deity effigies. Among the long list of gods who were given unspeakably sickening “offerings” and sacrifices (more than merely the Eucharist-cup example just given, but far too vile to give in full detail here) were Dionysus, Venus, Bacchus, Priapus, Daphne, and Flora. There are rumors in heavy circulation that Black Masses and satanic rituals took place regularly. Evidence that the “monks” were summoning the devil is not hard to find…

A story is told of an evening wherein English journalist and politician John Wilkes fastened a pull-string through a loop connected to a trunk with a monkey (dressed as a devil or demon) trapped inside. He waited for the right moment to pull the string and release the animal with the other members of the brotherhood present as a practical joke. It went as well as he could have hoped, as the primate instantly flew out of his prison and clung to John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, another of the brethren. But it is Lord Sandwich’s response to the sudden appearance of the “devil”—a response the brethren thought was hilarious but which we find disturbingly revealing of the club’s underlying nature—that is relevant to our reflection here:

At the chosen moment, Wilkes pulled the cord and out popped the wretched animal which leapt on to the shoulders of Lord Sandwich, who, feeling the shock and seeing the animal grinning horribly at him concluded that the Devil had obeyed his summons in good earnest and had come to carry him bodily away. The harder he tried to shake off the poor creature the tighter it clung, whilst Sandwich cried out: “Spare me gracious Devil: spare a wretch who never was sincerely your servant. I sinned only from vanity of being in the fashion; thou knowest I never have been half so wicked as I pretended: never have been able to commit the thousandth part of the vices which I have boasted of…leave me therefore and go to those who are more truly devoted to your service.”^[xv]

According to this oh-so-comical narrative, it wasn’t at all uncommon that these “monks” of the Hellfire brethren would get together and “summon the devil”—or at least, as Lord Sandwich admitted, “boast” about doing so. What is perhaps more enlightening is the fact that Sandwich, when he believed he had finally succeeded in summoning the devil who was now appearing for his dues, pleaded with the perceived apparition that he be spared, as he wasn’t as “truly devoted” to Satan as the rest of the Hellfire Club members. If, by his own admission, Sandwich was not as devoted as the others despite his direct summoning of the devil and the other “vices” he spoke of, what in the world were these other men doing that could possibly be so much worse as to prove their “true devotion”? It leaves much darkness to the imagination…

Later, when the club was dying off, it was documented that John Tucker—Hellfire Club “monk” and Member of Parliament for Weymouth, Massachusetts—was shocked to see the club’s disassembling. The description of this moment is also telling: “‘I was last Sunday at Medmenham and to my amazement found the Chapter Room stripped naked.’ Evidently, Sir Francis had decided that the time had come to remove all traces of incriminating evidence of the Club’s existence, including even the prints of the heads of kings and nuns and the pegs for the clothes with the brothers’ names above.”^[xvi]

Such hiding of “incriminating evidence” was the way of the brethren from the beginning, as all nefarious secret societies charge its members with vows of the utmost secrecy, and this one was no different. The fact, then, that Benjamin Franklin’s visits to this club and participation in its revelries remains an ongoing rumor with much supporting proof is unsettling. Many historians, books, and articles, as well as exposés produced by such sources as the History Channel specials on the secret societies of the founding fathers, go as far as calling him an official “member,” whereas countless others simply say that he was a frequenter of the monks’ establishment and would have—at the very least—been an eyewitness to the acts carried out in the club. What we know for certain, however, is that he was there, on the grounds of the Hellfire Club, on several occasions, during the debauchery. A letter to a friend back home in Philadelphia makes this fact irrefutable. Dashwood held the office of Joint Postmasters General in Great Britain from 1766 to 1781, the year of his death. Franklin was Deputy Postmaster General in America during this revolutionary period, so Dashwood was Franklin’s superior officer. It is a historic fact that their working together made the two men close friends, and Franklin was often invited for visits to Dashwood’s estate in West Wycombe.

Since the secretary of the Hell-Fire Club burned the club’s records the day before [Dashwood’s] death, there is no absolute proof that Franklin (or anyone else for that matter) was a member [outside of admission by documented correspondence that is]. But we do know that he made constant visits to West Wycombe and in July 1772 made a special trip from London to spend sixteen days with Sir Francis. We also know that there was a meeting of the club during this period and there seems to be no reason why Franklin should have gone to Wycombe at this special time unless he was a member. Only club members were allowed at Wycombe during meetings. Franklin did go into the caves, and only club members (except for servants and the “nuns”) were allowed past the iron gate. Franklin wrote to a friend in Philadelphia: “The exquisite sense of classical design, charmingly reproduced by the Lord le Despencer [Dashwood] at West Wycombe, whimsical and puzzling as it may sometimes be in its imagery, is as evident below the earth as above it.” This [“below the earth” reference] can refer only to the [Hellfire Club] caves.^[xvii]

And if Franklin were present, as the evidence is clear he was, common sense begs the questions: Would a secret society as despicably wicked as the Hellfire Club allow such a renowned figure into their midst if his only purpose there was to observe? Would that not be a threat to them if such a noteworthy man as Benjamin Franklin was calmly sitting nearby, sipping wine and taking mental notes about their orgies, pagan offerings, and mock human sacrifices? By the very nature of his refusal to participate, he would have been making a statement that he found their behaviors a moral contradiction to their office, would he not? Therefore, through the most rudimentary of kindergarten logic, wouldn’t he be a tattle-tale risk?

One does not have to be an expert in the field of research regarding secret societies to know that bystanders (translation: eyewitnesses) would not be allowed on the premises during such horrific events unless they, too, had been initiated into the society and held full participation in its ceremonies. All signs point to the facts that Franklin was a member of the Hellfire Club (as hundreds of sources convincingly portray) and that he would have taken part in their rituals, including mock sacrifices.

That makes this next bit about him even more unscrupulous.

In early 1998, about two hundred years after Franklin’s death, conservation work began on 36 Craven Street in London at the “Benjamin Franklin House” where he lived off and on between 1757 and 1775. When Jim Field of the renovation crew discovered the first of a collection of more than 1,200 animal and human bones in the basement under the floor of the Seminar Room (including enough skeletons for four whole adults and six whole children, but accumulatively, the bones were from at least fifteen people), an abrupt halt was brought to the conservation plans until a brief investigation could bring answers as to the nature of their concealment. Sunday Times ran the story, and an excerpt from this article states: “Initial estimates are that the bones are about two hundred years old [dating them to approximately the last decade of Franklin’s life] and were buried at the time Franklin was living in the house, which was his home from 1757 to 1762 and from 1764 to 1775. Most of the bones show signs of having been dissected, sawn or cut. One skull has been drilled with several holes.”^[xviii] After careful analysis and much documentation, it has been proven indisputably that the bones were buried while Franklin was living there.

The most popular explanation for the discovery by those who wish to exonerate Franklin from any dubious activity is the idea that the bones were obtained for study by Dr. William Hewson—a pioneer of hematology (the study of blood and blood disease)—who ran an anatomy school within Franklin’s home. Hewson, the story goes, conducted experiments on human cadavers to provide the medical community with beneficial research. It wasn’t until 1832 that such experimentation for the betterment of all mankind was made legal due to resistance from religious groups, so Hewson had to hide all traces of his work. The likeliest of all assumptions then, if this version of the story is true, is that Hewson obtained the cadavers from “the resurrectionists” body snatchers who provided fresh bodies in the middle of night via the Thames River and then disposed of them via burial in Franklin’s basement.

However, some of the bones were from animals, and many of the bones had been blackened by fire. If Hewson’s practice centered on animals occasionally, which is not unheard of for anatomical/medical experimentation, that part could be explained. What cannot be explained is why these bones would have been charred, as if by fiery sacrifice.

Understandably, between the close association of Franklin with the Hellfire Club and the burned bones buried beneath his house, many have come forward with theories that Franklin was far more involved with satanic rituals than he wanted the world to know about. Some postulate that the bodies arrived dead and were thereafter dissected and offered ceremoniously to pagan deities in that classic Dashwood flair; others suggest an even more frightening concept that Franklin was America’s first serial killer who followed through with real human sacrifices and thereafter had the bodies of his victims transported to Dr. Hewson so that if the evidence were ever found, Franklin would be able to skirt the blame on the noble cause of future medical ingenuity. Had Franklin’s reputation never initially been linked with visitations to the Hellfire Club and the darker sects openly connected to Freemasonry, these theories would sound conspiratorial and juvenile. Once the trail of questionable details is linked, however, such a notion is much less far-fetched.

But whatever the reason—anatomy school, human sacrifice, or posthumous offerings to the gods—at the very least, we know Franklin was not the “Christian founding father” he has so many times been remembered to be, and he said as much in a letter to Yale University’s president, Ezra Stiles:

As to Jesus of Nazareth, my Opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the System of Morals and his Religion, as he left them to us, the best the world ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupt changes, and I have, with most of the present Dissenters in England, some Doubts as to his divinity.^[xix]

Once again, we have a fellow “appreciator” of Jesus of Nazareth and the morals He spoke of, but Franklin was not by any stretch of the imagination a Christian man.

John Adams

Franklin’s close associate John Adams gave a similar response when asked about his convictions of the Holy Bible and its central character in a letter to Thomas Jefferson dated September 3, 1816:

I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved—the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced!^[xx]

To refer to the Gospels and the cross upon which Christ hung for the covering of humanity’s sins as an “engine of grief” is all the evidence we need from John Adams to move right along to the next on the list, knowing that Adams, too, was no Christian.

George Washington

Of course, the name many have been waiting for is the most celebrated founding father in US history: George Washington. Washington, like the others, appreciated the morality that Christ preached, but he, too, was a Deist—and a Freemason of the highest rank as of August 4, 1753, at the Masonic Lodge No. 4 in Fredericksburg, Virginia. We need not look far to find convincing proof that Washington’s associates already knew he was not a Christian in the traditional sense, as the country continues to claim.

Bishop James White, personal pastor to Washington for more than two decades, gave testimony that although our first president attended church regularly for religious cameos, Washington never gave anyone any reason to believe it was out of sincere conviction any more than it would have been to satisfy the expectations of his country’s Christian citizens. White said, “I do not believe that any degree of recollection will bring to my mind any fact which would prove General Washington to have been a believer in the Christian revelation.”^[xxi] White’s assistant, Reverend James Abercrombie, held the same opinion, and when questioned, his plain response was, “Sir, Washington was a Deist.”^[xxii]

Thomas Jefferson, in his journal entry on February 1, 1800, recalled a day when Washington had cleverly outmaneuvered a group of persistent clergymen who asked Washington outright whether he was going to proclaim or deny the Christian faith during his farewell address as president. Their inquiry came as a result of Washington’s continually avoiding the issue while in office. They had it in mind to put him on the spot and force an answer for the clarification of the American people. Jefferson writes:

[T]he old fox was too cunning for them. He answered every article in their address particularly except that, which he passed over without notice.… I know that Gouverneur Morris, who pretended to be in his secrets and believed himself to be so, has often told me that General Washington believed no more in the system [Christianity] than he did.^[xxiii]

At least another fifty equivalent examples could be given that strengthen the existent doubts of Washington’s Christianity. Although it has been documented scores of times that he found the moral fibers of Christianity a benefit to mankind (are we all seeing the pattern here?), and he said so often, no personal writings or quote of his can irrefutably prove that he was a Christian. Many documents and quotes can be found that prove at least his personal clergy believed he was not, and only acted as if he was so the question of his faith would not become a stumbling block to his reputation and legacy as first president of this “Christian” nation.

With these names addressed, one could continue to expound upon this list and include hundreds of others whose roles in the early-development phases of our country were crucial. Sadly, a heavy number of these names would also fall into the category of Freemason or Deist, and often simultaneously. Suffice it to say that our government was not, as so many still think, founded by devout followers of Christ. Some might say, and for good reason, that it was the opposite.

This opinion could easily be born out of a deeper understanding of Masonic and Freemasonic roots, whose shocking plans we’ll continue to expose in the next entry…

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[i] Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason; Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology (Borrois: Paris, 1794), Part 1, Section 1, as quoted by US History Online, last accessed April 13, 2017, http://www.ushistory.org/paine/reason/reason1.htm.

[ii] Thomas Paine, Age of Reason, Part 1, Section 5, http://www.ushistory.org/paine/reason/reason5.htm.

[iii] Thomas Paine, Age of Reason, Part 2, Section 20, http://www.ushistory.org/paine/reason/reason36.htm.

[iv] Thomas Paine, Age of Reason, Part 2, Section 14, http://www.ushistory.org/paine/reason/reason30.htm.

[v] David L. Holmes, The Faiths of the Founding Fathers (Oxford University Press, New York, NY; Kindle Edition: 2006), 41; emphasis added.

[vi] “Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 12 October 1813,” National Archives, last accessed April 17, 2017, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-06-02-0431.

[vii] “From Thomas Jefferson to Alexander Smyth, 17 January 1825,” National Archives, last accessed April 17, 2017, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-4882.

[viii] “From Thomas Jefferson to William Short, 31 October 1819,” National Archives, last accessed April 17, 2017, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-0850.

[ix] Julius F. Sachse, “The Masonic Chronology of Benjamin Franklin,” Historical Society of Pennsylvania, last accessed April 17, 2017, https://www.jstor.org/stable/20085334?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents, 238.

[x] Ibid.

[xi] Ibid., 239.

[xii] Ibid., 238.

[xiii] Ibid.

[xiv] Ibid., 240.

[xv] “The Hellfire Club,” Hellfire Caves Online, last accessed April 18, 2017, http://www.hellfirecaves.co.uk/history/hellfire-club/; emphasis added.

[xvi] Ibid; emphasis added.

[xvii] Daniel P. Mannix, The Hellfire Club: The Rise and Fall of a Secret Society (Ballantine: 1959). Quote taken from the 2015 eNet Press edition, 104; emphasis added.

^[xviii] “Benjamin Franklin, the Occult, and the Elite,” The Sunday Times, February 11, 1998.

[xix] “Benjamin Franklin,” The Encyclopedia Americana, Vol. XII (Encyclopedia Americana, 1919), 11.

^[xx] Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006), 43.

[xxi] John E. Remsburg, Six Historic Americans (New York: Truth Seeker, 1906), 193.

[xxii] Ibid.

[xxiii] The Literary Digest: Volume 24; No. 22 (New York, NY: Funk & Wagnalls, 1902), 746.