Rob at Madison's Montpelier estate in Virginia

It is a common claim that most of the Founders were deists. (A deist is a person who believes that there is a Creator but that He is not actively involved in the world—the “great watchmaker” hypothesis.)  As many authors have shown, the claim is false: Tom Paine aside, almost all the leading Founders professed some version of Christianity or, in a few cases, at least faith in a beneficent Providence that could and did intervene in the world.

So where did the “Founders were deists” story begin? Anyone know?