http://hnn.us/articles/47323.html<...>
The Christian-nation myth can be debunked by a little reading of original texts. In one of his letters Benjamin Franklin tells how he found the Calvinism in which he had been raised incomprehensible, so he abandoned it. He tried another church, was unimpressed by the sermon, and decided to spend his future Sundays reading at home. Franklin was not an atheist; he believed in a God and in an afterlife in which evil would be punished and good rewarded. He expressed some doubts about the divinity of Jesus, but said he was agnostic on the subject. And of course, unlike our evangelicals, Franklin was fascinated by science.
<...>
<...>
Like Franklin, Jefferson rejected Calvinism. On November 2, 1822, he wrote, “The blasphemy and absurdity of the five points of Calvin, and the impossibility of defending them, render their advocates impatient of reasoning, irritable, and prone to denunciation.” He complained that Presbyterians were meddling troublemakers, and stated that he looked forward to the day when all Americans would be Unitarians.
<...>
...and quite a bit more