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There have been disputes regarding Washington's Christian faith. There is no doubt that his public demeanor was pious and that he was a regular church attender, even when he was commander of the Continental Army. However, his writings, other than his youthful diaries, seldom used Christian specific language when referring to spiritual matters.

Since the generation of the Founding Fathers, there have been great religious shifts in the United States. The Episcopal, Presbyterian, Dutch Reformed, and Congregationalist denominations that were so important and prominent in the colonial era were eclipsed in popular support by the rising Baptist, Methodist, and Complete churches, which sent preachers to the frontiers and conducted widespread revivals during the 19th Century. There was the rise of new faiths that deviated in many respects from historic Christianity: Mormonism, Seventh Day Adventism, Christian Science, etc. European immigration caused massive growth in the Lutheran, Catholic, and Orthodox churches, whose presence was minimal, or in the case of Orthodoxy, nonexistent in early America.

However, the revivalist oriented churches, especially the Baptists, were rooted in Reformation theology. The Baptists in early America were strongly Calvinistic for the most part, disagreeing with the Presbyterians mainly on the issues of infant vs. believers baptism and church government. Methodism, in the footsteps of its founders, John and Charles Wesley, deviated from Calvinist doctrines of total depravity, election, and eternal security, areas in which the Wesleys followed the Dutch theologian Arminius. However, their roots in Anglicanism were reflected in Methodist theology.

Baptist and Methodist theology, as well as the historic doctrines of the other Protestant denominations, were drawn on the positions of the Reformation theologians. (One major change was in the area of eschatology, where dispensationalism promoted the concept of a distinction between national Israel and the church in terms of their respective role in God's plan for the future. Previously, Protestants, along with Catholics, taught that the church had replaced modern Israel.) The modern mainline churches, such as the Episcopalian Church, USA, the Presbyterian Church (USA), the United Methodist Church, the United Church of Christ, etc., abandoned classical Protestant theology starting in the late 19th Century. The mainline churches may carry the old Reformation era names, but their teachings are not those of Calvin, Luther, Knox, and Zwingli, but those of liberal theologians like Schleiermacher and Niebuhr. The churches that call themselves evangelical in our time are in the Reformation tradition and teach (with the principal exception of eschatology) the doctrines that the Founding Fathers would have heard from the pulpits of their era.