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#twitterstorians of religion. Just heard a speaker claim that 50-70% of white Americans at the time of the revolution were Calvinists in their theology? Does that sound right?
Thanks to all who responded to this query. I think the point they wanted to assert was that the majority of the founding generation believed in innate human depravity in a vaguely Calvinist sense. I suppose that's true, tho one needn't have been a Calvinist to believe that.
Another highlight from the talk was when the speaker used Washington's 1790 speech to the Jewish Congregation of Newport to make the claim that America had a Christian founding. Which is, IMO, quite a stretch. founders.archives.gov/documents/Wash…
The letter TO GW from one of the Jewish congregants obliquely alludes to the fact that Jews were still disenfranchised in RI. He was complimenting the new nation, headed by Washington, for including them as equal citizens, for NOT being a nation defined by Christianity. 
And as GW himself says, what makes someone a fully fledged member of the polity is their agreement to live as good citizens, giving their allegiance to the government. One could argue that GW was gently chiding RI's exclusionary policy that defined citizenship in religious terms.
The speaker's argument was that GW used biblical references and imagery to make the case for toleration, hence this proves the centrality of Christianity to the founding. This seemed like pretty tortured logic to me --"secularism is a Christian idea," but whatevs.
It also strikes me that the context here is important. The congregation had thrived before the revolution (perhaps as many as 200 congregants), but because many became Loyalists the congregation had shrunk down to almost nothing by 1790.
Antisemitism plus hatred of Loyalists meant that the Jews of Newport weren't necessarily the most cherished people in town...so GW was trying to tell the good Christians of RI to include Jews in their conception of who counted as a good American.
This speaker, who called themselves an originalist, seemed unaware that the Jews of Newport had mostly been Loyalists and that in 1790 hardly any still lived there. I guess knowing the context for a text is not part of what it means to be "an originalist?"
