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While some of the best known ones were Deists, most of the people who signed the Declaration or attended the Philadelphia Convention were just Christians, albeit frequently very lukewarm ones. More Washington than Jefferson. The effects of the First Great Awakening were starting to peter out and religion was becoming more laid back again, as it would become in cycles throughout American history. John Adams, for example, was a Congregationalist by birth, some of the most committed Christians in the country, but died a Unitarian, some of the vaguest and least fundamentalist.
Yeah, but we should be concerned with people's political and ideological positions relative to the time they lived in. Someone who was a radical in one period might be a conservative in another.
"Unitarianism" was so called because it denied the Trinity and the deity of Christ. Most fundamentalists today would consider 19th century Unitarians hellbound heretics, let alone their contemporaries. They also tended to put a premium on human reason rather than revelation, and many denied miracles, the infallibility of scripture, etc. It was a very much an 'enlightened' flavor of Christianity, to the extent it was Christianity at all.
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No real disagreement here, but there remains a debate about whether or not Washington was a Deist (and he was certainly a freemason). The list of notable deists records almost all the most important founders save Hamilton, including Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Franklin, Paine (and Washington, though up for debate). Otherwise agreed with the general Christianity of the time.
That's ironic for Adams, my understanding had always been that he was one of the more religious founders, waking up early to read the Bible and so forth.
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