I see the Founders as men of their times, still grappling to wrap their heads around an understanding of The Enlightenment. It's not surprising that their language still made use of symbology hanging over from the Dark and Middle Ages. That was natural considering their environments, education, and the publications of their day and prior which they built upon. They weren't so shallow as to throw the baby out with the bathwater willy-nilly and they realized these still contained much thought provoking wisdom. I think you may be fooling yourself to imagine they rejected the same from other cultures at the time. Their thinking was preceded by and overlapped the Scientific Revolution and the work of Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, Francis Bacon, Pierre Gassendi, and Isaac Newton, among others, as well as the rationalist philosophy of Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and John Locke. But they also looked to other religions in the Middle and Far East. Much of what you seem to be advocating didn't come from them but instead the failed and cast off of the southern colonies who became sharecroppers on the fringes of plantation society and the Scots-Irish late arrivals. These both embraced a crude Fundamentalist philosophy rather light on education and historical perspective. In contrast the Founders explored and became invested in a range of social ideas centered on the value of knowledge learned by way of rationalism and of empiricism and political ideals such as natural law, liberty, and progress, toleration and fraternity, constitutional government, and the formal separation of church and state. They widely circulated their ideas through meetings at scientific academies, Masonic lodges, literary salons, coffeehouses and in printed books, journals, and pamphlets. The ideas of the Enlightenment undermined the authority of the monarchy and religious officials and paved the way for the political revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries throughout the West. Franklin in particular had little patience for the "churched" and their churches.
Appreciate your time, thoughtful insight, and writing skills Jacob Petersheim, but we have different sources of history that form significantly different conclusions. I have no further desire to counter your world view, which by the way is the perspective taught and accepted these days by the majority of people and educational institutions. I pray regularly though that God will preserve America's Christian heritage that was so prevalent in the past but rejected and opposed during my own, short lifetime. It's a sad trend to see from a Christian perspective.