In recent weeks, a chorus of politicians and pundits has insisted that America’s Founding Fathers were devout Christian Zionists—men who saw the Jewish return to Palestine as a divine prerequisite for the Second Coming. They brand any skepticism as a “brain virus,” implying that only the spiritually deranged could doubt the founders’ supposed philo-Semitism. Yet this narrative collapses under even mild scrutiny: at the time of independence, twelve of the thirteen original states imposed explicit Christian tests for holding public office, and nine maintained established churches funded by taxpayer dollars. Jews, Catholics, Muslims, and non-Christians were routinely barred from voting or office-holding in most states; the federal Constitution may have forbidden religious tests, but that was a pragmatic compromise, not a theological embrace of Zion.

The truth is far stranger and more esoteric than either side admits. The American founding was, at its highest levels, a Masonic project steeped in Enlightenment occultism rather than evangelical fervor. Freemasonry’s rituals revolve around the Temple of Solomon, Hiram Abif, and the sacred geometry of the Old Testament—not out of love for contemporary Jews, but because those stories provided a mythic blueprint for building a new moral and political order. Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and many signers of the Declaration were either Masons or heavily influenced by Masonic ideals. Their fascination with ancient Israel was architectural and symbolic, not prophetic: they wanted to erect a new “Solomon’s Temple” of enlightened republicanism, not restore the old one in Jerusalem.

Ultimately, the founders were syncretists who cherry-picked from multiple traditions. They named the capital district “Rome” (it was literally called New Rome on early maps) because the Potomac flowed between seven hills like the Tiber, and they consciously modeled the Senate on the Roman original. Washington, D.C. itself is a geometric ritual city laid out with Masonic symbols, blending Roman civic grandeur with biblical temple imagery and Baconian dreams of a “New Atlantis.” They sought to transcend the failures of both ancient Israel (which lost its temple through internal strife) and papal Rome (which corrupted the Church) by forging a third, purified archetype on virgin soil—an American Jerusalem, a new Rome, and an enlightened Atlantis rising together while the old world rotted behind them. Christian Zionism it was not; it was something older, weirder, and far more ambitious.