I can’t bring the names to mind at the moment, but I believe several people in England — contemporaries of Burke, but not Burke himself — were not religious, yet still pushed for the essential value of morality based on the Bible.
As did Unitarians (who too soon kind of turned Harvard into its Vatican ), but even the non religious were deists of some sort.
Joshua Charles, New York Times bestselling author and researcher at the Museum of the Bible, explains.
What were the religious beliefs of the Founding Fathers of the United States?
There's been a lot of controversy surrounding this subject. But there shouldn't be.
Because of their prominence, I will discuss George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin—our nation’s first three Presidents, and the man referred to as “the
First American”—all of whom, even if some did not individually adhere to orthodox Christianity, were steeped in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Here’s what we can say for certain about their religious beliefs.
1) All of the Founders believed in a transcendent God, that is, a Creator who exists outside of nature.
2) All the Founders believed in a God who imposes moral obligations on human beings.
3) All the Founders believed in a God who punishes bad behavior and rewards good behavior in an afterlife.
The notion that any of the Founders believed in an impersonal deity who merely created the universe and then left it to itself is false. All of them believed in a God who, as Franklin said at the Constitutional Convention, “governs in the affairs of men.”
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