"Completely off topic but the word is 'tenet' not 'tenant'. I see this several times a day on Reddit and it's driving me crazy."

Mea culpa, mea culpa... :p

"Calvin Coolidge was a Christian"

He sure was! ;) (Did you reach your Calvin Coolidge goal yet?)

"You need to read more history. Paine wrote one pamphlet. "

You need to read more--Paine also wrote "The American Crisis" in 1776 and (after the Revolution but, hey, he still wrote it) "The Age of Reason," a full-length work.

"Jefferson wrote the Declaration, but then spent all his time in Virginia until he served in Washington's cabinet."

...Well the man who shot Franz Ferdinand killed only one person, but his "contribution" to starting WWI was pretty sizable nonetheless, wouldn't you agree?

"John Adams--he was the workhorse of the Founding."

And James Madison and Alexander Hamilton?

To cite good ol' Wikipedia again:

"Gordon Wood says that Hamilton dropped his youthful religiosity during the Revolution and became, "a conventional liberal with theistic inclinations who was an irregular churchgoers at best"; however, he returned to religion in his last years.[169] Chernow says that, "Like Adams, Franklin, and Jefferson, Hamilton had probably fallen under the sway of deism, which sought to substitute reason for revelation and dropped the notion of an active God will intervene in human affairs. At the same time, he never doubted God's existence, embracing Christianity as a system of morality and cosmic justice."[170][171] While Hamilton and the other founders could be considered deists in the sense that they embraced "rational religion", they were not deists in the sense of rejecting the idea of divine intervention.[172]"

That gives Hamilton (along with the others above...including Adams, as he was listed in there) a belief in a Creator God, but only has him hold Christian ideals as good for moral teaching and REJECTING the idea of divine intervention and the rest of the like material Jefferson rejected...

And that's basically 18th century deism anyway--belief in a watchmaker God, and (unless you're Paine) that Christianity can serve as a good source of moral parable if not a true one, and that the ideas of divinity and divine intervention, resurrection, miracles, all that...not very feasible and not embraced.

Again, if you want to say that we're "founded" by a Judeo-Christian culture--well, yes.

That's practically synonymous with saying we were founded by a European culture.

But the Founders themselves aren't what most today would consider "Christian," I'll put it that way...a belief in a Creator, yes, but most Americans today would be outraged if a modern candidate announced they thought the miracles in the Bible were nonsense or that Jesus wasn't divine and not the Messiah and so on.

Which is my basic point--Judeo-Christian/European culture but that did NOT seep through into the Founding documents, which were founded on Enlightenment ideals.

"That you dismiss [Adams] so easily is ridiculous."

I don't--he can enjoy his place on the $2 bill. ;)

But in all seriousness, he IS important...

I'm just saying--Jefferson, Paine, Franklin, Hamilton...I'm so far "winning" the Enlightenment Deist vs. Christian score, those 4 to your 1 (and your 1 has a bit of an asterisk as my quote above included Adams--still, even if we give you Adams, it's 4 vs. 1 still, and as much influence as Adams had, my folks were no slouches either in terms of Founding influence to the framework of this country.)

"Assuming we accept that the founders were primarily non-Christian secularists, doesn't that put the responsibility for slavery, the oppression of women, gays, and Native Americans squarely on the secularists?"

I'll say yes and no--

Partially because of the diversity of that list (I'll explain what I mean shortly) and partially because the responsibility for those crimes go to both the few folks at the top who LET it happen and the many, many people below them who MADE it happen (and that I won't even pretend to say was mostly secularist as most common Americans were definitely Protestant.)

Now, as to that "diversity"--

I'll tackle this in two parts: Slavery (as that's the most complex case, I think) and then the others. So--

Some wanted to deal with slavery and outlaw it at the Constitutional Convention.
Some did not.
And the greater majority of the Convention realized that this sort of disagreement...

Well, it might be the sort of thing that could spark a Civil War--which is never a good thing, but seeing as we'd just won our independence and this framework was fragile as it was...even knowing it was wrong, some anti-slavery folks had to concede the point to allow the Constitution and country to get off the ground at all.

So I think it is and isn't fair to blame secularists on the slavery issue--

Certainly secularists like Jefferson WERE hypocrites, writing "all men are created equal" but holding slaves, and so yes, some secularists are to blame--by the same token, some also wanted slavery gone to make those words fully mean what they were supposed to mean and only compromised that vision to keep things from blowing apart at the ignition phase.

So they're responsible, but so are the millions of Christian masses.

Now, I can already hear the understandable objection--

"If you split the difference with secularists, saying some for and some against slavery, why don't you cut the Christians the same slack on that account?"

My answer is this:

Even though I do (and have) acknowledged the Christian Abolitionists, nevertheless--

Judeo-Christian ideology IS part of the reason slavery was permitted in America IN THE FIRST PLACE. I again cite Exodus and all the other slave-condoning books and passages I always cite when I bring up this fact--

By contrast, there's no secularist "doctrine" that said "Here is why slave-owning is not only OK, but a higher, infallible, commanding power decrees it so."

As such, I can say secularism--on its own--had nothing to do with slavery, even if some secularists (again, Jefferson) WERE hypocritical and owned slaves...

By contrast, Christianity cannot make that claim--those passages were used to condone and allow slavery in Europe, and they were used to condone, allow, and even encourage the practice in America.

With the secularists, it's Jefferson holding slaves IN SPITE or SEPARATE of his secularist ideals...

With the Christians, it's slavery being condoned BECAUSE of Christian ideals.

And for slavery, at least, that's the difference for me.

As to the other groups:

"the oppression of women,"

A shorter yes and no--the secularists of the 18th century certainly contributed to the oppression of women...but I'd argue the key term there is "18th century" and not "secularist."

No secularist ideal kept women out in the 18th century--it was "just" age-old sexism.

The closest you could point to was the idea that women were supposed to be "Mothers of Republican Virtue," which IS something of an Enlightenment ideal, but the concept of women staying at home to do the housework and provide physical and moral "support" for the man is, again, as old as time in the West...the Enlightenment era simply gave it a nicer name to make the white male adherents feel better about it.

So short-sighted and sexist, yes, but that's more of a Western/18th century issue than an issue that was inherent in Enlightenment ideals.

Next:

"gays,"

...No. Give me one scrap of evidence that secularists were anti-gay.

ESPECIALLY as most of the opposition to gays was (and still IS) due to CHRISTIAN opposition.

I think we can score this one, at least, a win for the secularists and loss for the Christians, FlemGem... ;)

"Native Americans"

Hm.

You know...I really don't know who should get most of the blame for that (in terms of WHICH white males to bash, that is.)

I think we can count this a loss on both sides...

Neither side really argued against it and both sides, both the Christian and deist Founders, were pretty OK with it at the time...