The role of religion in the founding of America is more controversial today than ever. The riot at the United States Capitol in January 2021 unleashed a flood of acrimony towards Christian nationalists. Critics point to the attackers who carried Christian and Bible-themed signs as they stormed the Capitol building. This attack, they say, is the product of decades of white Republican evangelicals clamoring for America to be a Christian nation, a nation that politicized evangelicals say needs to be “taken back” from the secular left.

We live in a time of cultural extremes. These extremes have damaged our ability to appreciate the complexities of the American past. On all fronts, polemicists insist that American history must be one thing or the other. For example, Nikole Hannah-Jones fans Project 1619 focus almost exclusively on white supremacy and America’s original sin of slavery, while some partisan critics of the project insist that much of today’s discussion of racism and oppression in American history are just the patter of critical race theorists.

We had a similar argument about religion in American history. The attack on Capitol Hill has dramatically increased the volume of this debate. For the laity, the American foundation was a purely Enlightenment and non-religious affair led by deists (or perhaps hidden atheists) such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Proponents of Christian America counter that the Founding Fathers were mostly devout believers. Although a few were not very devout or orthodox, their political culture was still so deeply Christian that they might as well have quoted chapters and verses from the Bible when they wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Where is the truth between these partisan polarities? Take the example of the Declaration of Independence and its principal author Jefferson. The declaration’s iconic status in American history is beyond doubt. Virtually every line of the statement, especially in its famous opening paragraphs, has been analyzed in depth. Yet there is still no agreement as to whether it was secular or religious. The famous book by historian Pauline Maier American Writing: Making the Declaration of Independence (1997) captured this interpretative tension well. On the one hand, she acknowledged that the declaration serves as “American scripture” in our nation’s civil religion. On the other hand, Maier seemed oddly oblivious to the religious content of the statement itself. She noted that the Continental Congress felt compelled to add two references to God to the declaration because, she asserted, such references were conspicuously lacking in Jefferson’s draft. Then she mentioned confusingly that God only appeared in Jefferson’s project “as the author of the laws of nature and holder of natural rights.”

Alone? Maier was referring, first, to Jefferson’s line about how “the laws of nature and nature’s God” justified independence. Second, God was the essential agent in the most powerful line of the whole statement: are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. For the vast majority of Americans in 1776, this “Creator” was the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Being the author of natural law and the guarantor of human rights seems to be quite an important role for God to play.

As I show in my new biography of Jefferson, the author of the statement was already skeptical in 1776 of fundamental Christian doctrines such as the trinity, the divinity and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. So he wasn’t writing these lines about God because he was kind of a born-again predecessor to the Christian right.

Throughout his career, Jefferson tried to calm his doubts about biblical revelation. His opponents have made a big ruckus about the slightest hints of his heterodox beliefs. An 1800 Federalist editorial proclaimed that a vote for Jefferson was a vote for “NO GOD!” Even in retirement, he refused to publish his famous Jefferson Bible. It was his compilation of the Gospels, from which he literally cut out many miracles with a penknife. In his version, for example, there was no resurrection, just an occupied grave. Jefferson feared the fierce Christian backlash he would receive if he exposed his naturalistic distillation of the Gospels to public view. In other words, this skeptical founder was not the kind of person who would try to slip biblical references into America’s founding documents.

And yet, the argument for the statement depended entirely on God himself. Jefferson and Congress basically based the document on the concept of God’s joint creation of mankind. Without Creator God, there is no Declaration of Independence. Why would a skeptic like Jefferson make such a deeply theological statement? Jefferson was a bundle of contradictions on many issues. Obviously, he was a slave owner who claimed that all men were created equal. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that its uses of religion are so complicated.

But we can begin to unpack the riddle of Jefferson, the declaration and religion by remembering that the declaration was first and foremost a political document. Americans were already at war with the formidable British army, a conflict that had begun in April 1775. Open discussions of independence had not surfaced until January 1776, with the publication of the scintillating pamphlet Common Sense by Thomas Paine. Declaring independence was not as easy or obvious as it might seem in retrospect. It took a long time for the Americans to get there. Jefferson was a resourceful political writer, but in the statement he was simply trying to reflect the “harmonizing feelings of the day,” he explained. It was a document intended to unite politically committed Americans around the cause of independence.

Calling people to sacrifice lives and treasures in war almost always generates talk about God. Such civil-religious rhetoric can be sincere or cynical, depending on the occasion. Jefferson’s religious feelings definitely seemed sincere. Appealing to the “Supreme Judge of the World”, Congress defended the righteousness of their cause, pledging to uphold independence on their sacred honor. Jefferson understood that independence could not be justified solely by the colonists’ self-interest or their unwillingness to pay taxes. He undoubtedly believed that this was a struggle in which the patriots needed God’s blessing or they would lose.

We can also forget that Jefferson, for all his doubts about basic Christianity, believed in a creator God. Unlike the more rigid deists, he also believed that God sometimes acts in human history, by the providence of God. Jefferson lived in a pre-Darwinian world in which few could imagine human life as anything other than the pinnacle of a divinely created order. Perhaps, for Jefferson, humans were not created exactly as the book of Genesis says. But where could life have come from, other than God? Naturalistic evolution is barely on the horizon in 1776. If God created man, then God also endowed man with rights, which were precisely not alienable by any human authority.

In this sense, Jefferson was not a traditional Christian, but a traditional theist. The statement does not say anything that we would consider specifically Christian (like an affirmation of Jesus as Lord), but it does depend deeply on belief in a created order. Jefferson’s largely Christian audience also resonated with what the statement said about God, creation and rights. Such talk was indeed harmonizing in Jefferson’s world, whether for mainstream believers or skeptics like himself.

The very text of the declaration should therefore leave polemicists on both sides of the “Christian nation” debate unsatisfied. Jefferson was personally skeptical of Christian doctrine. The statement does not mention the trinity, resurrection, divinity of Christ or other essential Christian principles. But that hardly makes it secular. The declaration remains a powerfully theological document. It views our common creation by God as the basis of our equality and rights. Its theological character is precisely what made the statement the most resounding statement of human equality the world has ever seen.

Thomas S. Kidd is a professor at Baylor University and Midwestern Baptist Seminary, and the author of Thomas Jefferson: A Biography of Spirit and Flesh (Yale University Press). He wrote this for The Dallas Morning News.