Actually, I don't think that Michelle and I differ on very much.

We both believe that separation of church and state was an intentional aspect of the origins of our nation. We both agree that it remains, to this day, a critically important principle, and we agree that the principle is currently under threat from a growing subset of militant Christians.

Our difference, if it is a difference, is not one of politics. We perhaps read the zeitgiest of the late 18th century a little differently. And we may have a slightly different view of the intellectual temperament of the typical educated, elite, American male of that era.

Our difference may well be the product of the fact that one of us is a secular Jew and the other is a (more or less) observant Anglican.

We read the same facts through slightly different prisms. I included the narrative of the Episcopal Constitutional Convention of 1787 because it really was almost the same crowd that wrote our national Constitution.

The spirit of the European enlightenment touched both conventions in Philadelphia --- A little more 1662 BCP at the one, a little more Voltaire, Montesquieu and La Déclaration des droits de l'homme at the other.

The power of mainstream Protestantism was strong in 1787 and did not diminish for some time. Half of all our presidents over the past 200 and some years have been Episcopalians or Presbyterians.

We may argue about how observant they were--- some certainly less so than others. But they tended to marry and die with the trappings of Trinitarian liturgy.

A surprising number of presidents were interred with the classic "seven sentences" of the Anglican requiem (even presidents like Ronald Reagan who was baptized in the Disciples of Christ, but whose Funeral at the National Cathedral was framed with the Anglican seven sentences.

For the curious I'll offer the first and the fourth (enough to demonstrate that there is more than the proverbial Deism embodied in the words:

1) I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.

4) Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.

My own historical prism illuminates the Founders as men bounded by their experience. The world they knew best was largely Protestant (with a sprinkling of non believers) and they did not anticipate the waves of immigration that would enrich the confessional complexity of the country they were founding.

Whether my take holds up to the next generation of historical scrutiny or whether Michelle's take becomes the received historical judgment on the Founders’ mindset, the more important point is that we both agree that they sought to build a system of governance that would not be dominated by a sect, by a church, or by a religious dogma.

There are forces loose today in our nation that seek to undo that intention and neither Michelle nor I are sanguine about this.