Rob Boston, of Americans United, tells us that five members of our founding generation—Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Paine—were so religiously unorthodox as to be unelectable today.
I’ll grant him Tom Paine (who probably wouldn’t have been electable even in his own time), but not the others.
There are two points worth making here. First, it is indeed the case that our public religious style is more demonstrative now. People are more willing to wear their faithful hearts on their sleeves. But public appeals to religion and indeed to Christianity have long been a part of our political culture .
This leads to my second point, implicitly granted by Boston. Whatever their private opinions, most members of the founding generation were quite convinced that morality rested (for almost everyone) on a religious foundation. They were therefore willing to give public support (as in the Northwest Ordinance) to the teaching of religion and certainly paid it public respect. In other words, because they were convinced of the necessity of religion for republican citizenship, they were more willing to lend their public support to religious expression and religious institutions. They in no way shared the aggressive disdain and intolerance of many of today’s atheists and secularists.
I don’t think, as Boston seems to, that the majority of Americans are intolerant of religious heterodoxy. But they draw the line, as they should (if they take the advice of many members of the founding generation) at hostility to religion.
