Eric Metaxas set out to write a lively, readable account of the American Revolution and instead found a steady stream of evidence that challenges common assumptions about the founders, especially their faith and the role of religion in the founding era. His digging turned into a book that insists the story of 1776 is deeply infused with Christian language and belief, not the secular experiment some scholars portray. The result is a frank conversation about Washington, the founders, and what it means for Americans today.
Metaxas says his goal from the start was simple and personal. “I said, ‘I just want to write a very compelling, very readable, fun, gallop-through-our-history [book],’” and he meant it. He expected a brisk history, not a forensic challenge to a prevailing narrative about the founders.
But the more Metaxas read original letters, sermons, and public statements from the era, the more details surprised him and pushed him to rethink the conventional wisdom. He kept running into language and examples that point back to a distinctly Christian worldview woven into public life.
A central flashpoint for Metaxas is the claim that George Washington was a deist, a belief system that treats God as a distant creator who does not intervene. Metaxas rejects that label outright and uses a blunt word to make his point: “baloney.” He argues the label flattens a complex faith life into a tidy category that doesn’t fit the evidence.
He presses the point forcefully. “Washington was no deist. What a joke. What a lie,” he exclaims, and then points readers back to the primary documents for proof. The rhetoric, the scriptural references, and the public invocations all, in his view, point to a man who used biblical language in a civic way.
Metaxas places the founders in a tradition that reaches back to biblical moments of leaving monarchy and asserting a direct relationship with God. “These were men of profound Christian faith who set about doing something that had never been done since the Israelites were in the Sinai wilderness, where they left Pharaoh and left Egypt and looked directly to God without an earthly king. … This is what the founders were trying to do,” he explains, and he insists this ambition shaped both rhetoric and institutions.
He goes further, arguing that many founders saw their task as restoring biblical principles within public governance rather than erasing religion from public life. All of the founders, he argues, understood that the goal was to “bring the Bible into government.” That claim runs counter to the secular founding trope and is a driver of Metaxas’s argument throughout the book.
Glenn Beck, who interviews Metaxas, has long pushed back against the deist narrative too and points to stylistic evidence in Washington’s letters. “In this one letter [George Washington wrote], I think it’s 24 different scriptures are quoted without him quoting it. It’s just part of his language,” Beck says, and he uses that pattern to argue Washington spoke and thought in a scriptural idiom.
There are other patterns Beck and Metaxas highlight, like repeated references to providence and public gratitude for divine intervention. “A deist cannot believe in miracles,” he remarks, and that distinction matters for how we interpret eighteenth-century political theology. Belief in miracles and divine providence, they say, sits uneasily with the neat label of deism that many textbooks default to.
Metaxas sums up his obligation as a writer and citizen: “It is our duty to know this.” He says finding the truth about our origins matters because it shapes how we think about liberty, law, and moral responsibility. That conviction drove him to write the book titled “Revolution: The Birth of the Greatest Nation in the History of the World,” which he describes as an effort to reclaim a lost angle on American beginnings.
He points to the current milestone moment—our 250th anniversary—and frames it as more than nostalgia. “This is our 250th,” he says. “This is our last exit before the toll. We the people need to understand how our government works, … that all of our founders understood our liberties come from God.” If you want to hear more about his findings and see the documents he discusses, watch the clip above.
