| While religiosity has been diverging significantly over the last decades, no such different existed in the times you mention, i. e. from first settlements to, say, WW2. The degree to which the founding fathers were religious is debatable. It would appear to be singular achievement for men of actual, deep faith to resist the temptation to recreate the sort of intertwined state and church typical of the time. A somewhat more believable narrative is that the founding fathers tended more to the religious ideas of enlightment, in a process parallel to what would later result in the french revolution. That believe system is called "deism" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deism#Deism_in_the_United_Stat...) and Wikipedia lists quite a few well-known names (with varying degrees of evidence). It is unlikely that any of them believed in a "Wealthy god", for most of these men were quite smart, and had studied philosophy, while the idea of God being "wealthy" in a material sense is insanely stupid: Once you've created the universe, you really don't care about your ranking on the Forbes list. There is, obviously, the Calvinist/Puritan tradition that emphasised work ethics (plus burning of witches). But it's important to remember that these were very small communities, and that about a hundred years passed between the pilgrims and US independence. By that time, these groups were but a minor fraction of the population. The vast majority of delegates to the Continental Congress were therefore (officially) Anglicans or "mainline" Protestants. That's not to discount the Quaker/Calvinist/etc. influence, which certainly played a role. But it's unclear if the causality was quite as easy as one may think: after all, religious believes emphasising self-reliance may just be too good a fit for the needs of small groups of settlers arriving on a vast and wild continent. So it's just as believable that the importance of such doctrine was retrofitted to the needs of the time, possibly even afterwards. In any case, drawing an equivalence from these early believes of redemption through work to today's version of retrofitting religion to match culture, namely the so-called "Prosperity Gospel" is a simplification bordering on insult. That's easily observed by comparing adherence of the former tradition (the Amish being the closest example you'll find) and the latter (the President comes to mind). The missing pieces are obvious: humility was certainly among the values, but wealth wasn't. While hard work was/is emphasised, it was/is not intended to lead to earthly riches, but to atone for the original sin and, by God's grace, lead to rewards not in this life, but what comes next. |
Considering that the sectarian violence of the English Civil War was still fresh in their minds, and that many of the States did have different official state churches (e.g. MA:Puritan, PA:Quaker, MD: Catholic), they all made a pragmatic compromise to prohibit the congress from establishing a federal religion or interfering with the state religions of any of the several states.
As an example, the original MA state constitution, written by Adams, makes the Congregationalist church the state religion, and guarantees state funding to construct a church in each town and pay a Congregationalist minister to preach there. That's why there is a quaint white wooden church in the center of each town in MA and ME (which was part of MA at the time).
Jefferson might have been a deist and his Democrats have always been more aligned with the spirit of the French enlightenment and revolution, but the Whigs/Federalists were most definitely not.