The Rev. Mel McGinnis’ latest opinion piece, “Were the Signers Really Just Deists?” argues that the men who signed the Declaration of Independence were majority Christian, not Deist. There are multiple pitfalls in this argument.

First, he suggests that Christianity and Deism are two separate religions. But Deism should be considered a philosophical approach to Christianity, not a faith or denomination unto itself. So it’s not a contradiction for one to be both a Christian and a proponent of Deism. Asserting a hard line between them is a matter of dogmatic conviction, not historical fact.

Second, McGinnis supports his argument by demonstrating that four of the “signers”–Charles Carroll, Benjamin Rush, Roger Sherman, and John Witherspoon–were devout Christians. Fine, but he’s talking about signers of the Declaration of Independence. Only Sherman also signed the U.S. Constitution, the main legally binding document of the federal government. The Declaration was a list of grievances against King George III, an aspirational statement of dissent from the Divine Right of Kings–not a legal document like the Constitution.

At the end of the day, McGinnis’ argument is meaningless, because the question of the separation of Church and State is crystal clear in the U.S. Constitution. There, the “establishment clause” of Article One states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” That elegant language means that A) the federal government can’t establish Christianity (or any other religion) as the official faith of the nation, infusing its beliefs into our government, and B) it can’t prohibit people of any faith–or no faith–from practicing their religion.

The signers of the Constitution had something at least as important as faith. They had wisdom–the wisdom to assert a clear separation between religion and secular law. Thomas Jefferson (not one of McGinnis’ exemplars) coined the phrase “wall of separation between church and state” in his 1802 letter to the Danbury, Connecticut Baptist Convention, one of many examples of his genius in establishing the tenets of American democracy.

Jefferson was echoing the establishment clause of the Constitution, but he was also reflecting the influence of Deism. It was a natural fit for Jefferson and other Founders who were products of the Enlightenment, drawing on the scientific and philosophical work of Rousseau and Locke as much as the Old and New Testaments. The radical form of self-governance they adopted resonated with Deism’s assertion that logic and reason–rather than dogma and spiritual mystery–must guide the course of human life.

I looked for the inevitable point in McGinnis’ piece that, because the signers were largely Christians, the separation of Church and State is invalid and the United States should be considered a “Christian nation.” The pivot comes in the final paragraph when he says, “The deism argument…about our founders often is trucked out to discredit or marginalize any connection of God to education and government…” There it is: the reason for his pedantic focus on how devout the signers (of the wrong document) were.

Revisionist history is a dangerous thing, where facts are cherry picked and stitched together into a Frankenstein monster of civics. It would have us believe that slavery in America was really a successful job training program, or that women have been unhappy with the burden of full protection under the law. It would have us believe that the Founders intended this republic to be a Christian nation from the start, despite the words of the Constitution they composed.

Eric Jackson-Fosberg is a Jamestown resident.