I’ve said a few times that the culture wars have distorted the real story of how we ended up with religious freedom. But except in very broad terms, I haven’t stated what I think did happen. Obviously, that’s what the whole book is about so I can only provide an absurdly truncated history of religious freedom in America. Here goes:

America was settled to be a Christian land. To be more precise, it was settled to be Protestant nation. Inhabitants of most colonies prior to the revolution were not interested in religious pluralism or tolerance. They wanted society based on Protestant principles, with a strong mingling of church and state and vigilant antagonism towards Catholicism. Almost all of the colonies tried some variant of state-supported religion and everyone one of those experiments failed. Perhaps the most important flair-ups of persecution came in a few Virginia counties, as they were witnessed by a thoroughly disgusted young James Madison. He and the other Founders looked at the wreckage of these experiments and concluded that official state religions led to oppression of minority religions and lethargy among the majority religions.

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Many of you commented that the Founders’ religious beliefs did not determine their approach to separation of church and state. I agree. So let’s turn now to the big question: what DID the Founders believe about separation of church and state?

First, there’s no such thing as “the Founders.” They disagreed with each other on a number of key points. John Adams and George Washington supported more church-state mingling than did Jefferson and Madison. Crucially, while some folks back then seemed to use the term “establishment” to refer to official state religions, Madison for one thought it meant something much broader. During the fight in Virginia over state support of churches, he referred to tax subsidies for religion as being “an establishment,” just as dangerous ultimately as an official church.

Second, though it’s certainly interesting and important what the Founders believed on this – hell, a lot of my book is about that topic – that alone doesn’t determine what the law is on separation of church and state.

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“But you are a sneaky bastard, just the same. You tweaked the passions with your first installment and enraged them in your second, all without comment to the fire spitting from the belly of our collective beast of burden, the search for truth.”

Guilty as charged. I did start off with two provocative fallacies without shedding all that much light on why this has anything to do with the birth of religious freedom. The main reason I did that (besides hoping to get your attention) was this: the culture wars have distorted the birth of religious freedom and also the Founders’ beliefs.

There’s a common script we see all the time. Conservatives tend to argue that a) the Founders were orthodox Christians and b) that they therefore opposed real separation of church and state. That’s a non-sequitor, and one that would be rather confusing to the Founders. In the 18th century, some of the biggest advocates FOR separation of church and state were the evangelical Christians, especially the Baptists of Virginia and Massachusetts.

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In my last post, I mentioned the number one "liberal fallacy." Here is one of the common conservative myths: "Most Founding Fathers were serious Christians."

Of course it depends on how one defines the term, but if we use the definition of Christianity offered by those who make this claim – i.e. conservative Christians – then the Founders studied in this book were not Christians. Adams became an active Unitarian, rejecting much Christian doctrine. And Franklin, Jefferson and Adams abhored the Calvinist idea that salvation was determined by divine preference rather than good works. Madison and Washington remained the most silent on matters of personal theology and continued to attend Christian churches but in their voluminous writings never seemed to speak of Jesus as divine. If they must wear labels, the closest fit would be “Unitarian.”

Jefferson & Franklin overtly rejected the divinity of Jesus. Jefferson loathed the entire clerical class and what had become of Christianity. It's really quite amazing to read Jefferson spew venom toward religious leaders. Imagine a president saying some of these things today:

On the Apostles: "ignorant, unlettered men" who laid "a groundwork of vulgar ignorance, of things impossible, of superstitions, fanaticisms, and fabrications."

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The idea for this book came a few years back after I'd gotten a blizzard of e-mails of culture warriors on the left of right, each quoting a Founding Father to prove whatever point the activist was making. One day it would be a conservative using a quote to prove that this was a Christian nation. The next it would be a progressive highlighting a different quote proving the Founder's commitment to separation of church and state.

It felt a bit like a custody battle for the Founding Fathers, and prompted me to get curious what really happened. So, the meta-premise of my book, Founding Faith, is that the culture wars have utterly distorted the history of how we ended up with religious freedom in America. Though the book is written mostly has a historical narrative – starting with the settling of the New World and ending with the Founders in retirement – along the way it argues that several of the most common assumption about the Founders and religion are wrong. In each post this week, I'll address a different myth.

Liberal Fallacy #1: Most founding fathers were Deists or secular.

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In response to the commenters from yesterday, I thought that I would use my last day here at Table of One to talk about young people and policy. Typically, politicians don’t talk about youth-centric policies. It was even a running joke among some old Music for America colleagues that John Kerry would go to college campuses in 2004 and talk about Medicare (or whatever the “hot” issue was during that media cycle). It was the use of students as props for the latest talking point, not as a constituency to be taken seriously in itself.

This is something of a chicken/egg problem. Politicians don’t talk about youth-centric policies precisely because it is their belief that young people don’t vote, and young people don't vote because they don't hear anything relevant to their lives in the policy discussion. This week I’ve focused largely on the new infrastructure that exists to get young people to vote precisely because I think it’s up to us to break this vicious cycle. If we turn out, politicians will take notice and our issues will be addressed. I agree with the commenters that thanks to the campaign of Sen. Obama, who made young people a priority from day one, this problem is now being attacked from both sides, but it remains to be seen if Obama’s campaign template will become a model or an aberration this cycle.

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Continuing where we left off yesterday, the [dot] Org Boom produced dozens of new organizations dedicated to engaging young voters and matching the leadership development pipeline of the conservative youth factory. As more organizations tried varying strategies, new best practices emerged (and continue to emerge), the number of groups in operation was whittled down, and the movement began to professionalize and specialize.

Thanks to the progressive bent of the Millennial Generation and the successes of the progressive youth movement in recent years, the Democratic Party is on the cusp of a windfall of support that could sustain the party well into the 21st Century. The potential is exciting, but the outcome is far from determined. Despite our many successes thus far, this new youth infrastructure – still in its infancy – has many holes. The gains we have made are fragile and tentative, and could easily evaporate. There are also whole swaths of the electorate that are still underserved by the current youth infrastructure. These constituencies need to be engaged if the movement is to reach its full potential.

Today I want to talk about what some of those holes are, and what the significance of all this is for the Democratic Party.

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Obama may not have clinched the nomination last night, but he continues to ride a wave of youth support. Last night young voters in Ohio chose him 61 to 35 percent over Sen. Clinton. In Texas, he won the youth vote 58 – 42 percent. The youth vote is up in every contest thus far – sometimes double, triple, and even quadruple the levels we saw in 2004. In most states, the number of young voters participating in the Democratic contest outnumbers their Republican peers 2 – 1. Obama is riding this wave – and certainly he is amplifying it – but he did not create it.

We’ve talked about the Millennials and about the conservative youth factory. Now it’s time to take a look at the last five years and see just how Millennials altered the playing field to match their conservative counterpart. This is a Cliff's Notes version, to be sure, as this post covers in 1000 words what takes three chapters to describe in my book.

I would argue that the growth of the progressive youth movement thus far has come in two stages.

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Yesterday we talked about the Millennials – who they are, what they believe, and the characteristics with which demographers and generational theorists attribute them. Today I want to talk about the political playing field onto which Millennials emerged in 2002 and 2003.

There’s a saying that if you are under 30 and conservative you have no heart, but if you are over 30 and liberal you have no brain. The implication is that people’s political ideology changes as they grow older. This is a nice bit of conventional wisdom, but like so much other conventional wisdom it’s also false. Partisanship is a habit instilled early in life, which is why reaching out to young voters is so important – it builds the base of your future coalition. Unfortunately, during the late 1970s through the beginning of this century, Democrats almost completely ceded the playing field to conservatives.

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It’s a little bizarre these days, writing about the youth vote. Ever since Sen. Obama’s upset in Iowa the youth vote has dominated the news, and that is a change to be sure. I’ve been working in or writing about youth politics since 2003, and for five years it has been an uphill battle to convince people that we really are seeing a sea-change in youth participation. Fast forward less than two months, and what was once an impossibility is now a given. The genie is out of the bottle, but most people still don’t understand the significance of what is happening, and even fewer understand where it came from.

So that’s what I’d like to do with my time with you here at Table of One. Over the next five days, I’d like to talk about the history of the youth vote, why Barack Obama is just the very visible tip of the iceberg that is today’s rising youth participation, what it all means for the Democrats, and how the broader progressives movement can capitalize on this youth wave to secure a progressive future majority far into the 21st Century. This will be, in miniature, the same argument I lay out in my book, Youth to Power: How Today’s Young Voters Are Building Tomorrow’s Progressive Majority.

I’d like to begin by sketching out a portrait of young voters themselves – the Millennials. Who are these young voters that are shaking up Democratic politics? Where do they come from and what do they believe?

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While we wind down this year’s nominating season, and with it, the possibility of our nation’s first woman president, the New York Times reported today on President Bush’s visit to another first and only, Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. She is the much beloved leader of a country whose current situation makes any economic issues in America look like minor tribulations. Surviving over a decade of bloodshed, rape, destruction and terror that impoverished this nation, Johnson Sirleaf, who is also called Mama Ellen, was overwhelmingly elected to rebirth a country that has little running water or power, an 80% unemployment rate, and a life expectancy of 42 years.

Though its civil war may have come to a close, Liberia still faces the dubious challenge of restoring human security: clean water, safe streets, access to jobs and energy, healthcare and education. The concept of human security was first proposed by Dr. Jessica T. Matthews, in an article for Foreign Affairs in 1997. She pointed out that the security of an individual does not necessarily derive from the security of the nation, and that threats to human security often lead to physical instability and conflict. Though these threats are more apparent in weak states than strong states, the conflicts that turn into war are less about state verses state and more about internal crises that pit tribe against tribe, region against region. Kenya’s recent debacle is the latest manifestation of human insecurity.

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There’s been a lot of discussion these past few days about Senator Clinton in response to my Table for One posts. Of course, in the current political climate, it makes sense to reference her historic bid for the presidency when discussing women’s political leadership. But it’s also important not to conflate her candidacy with broader concepts regarding the political pipeline and the “first and only” phenomenon. What I am most concerned with, when it comes down to it, is the bigger picture: the monumental task of transforming our system of government into the representational democracy it really should be.

The desire for that kind of change is precisely what’s driven record numbers of voters turn out for their Presidential primaries year. The formula is simple, and it's the key to how you get new people invested in democracy: offer people candidates who are not only politically savvy and experienced, but who also actually look like them, and voters will begin to feel there is place for them in our political system. In both Senators Obama and Clinton, many voters see viable candidates who, for the first time, are accessible and familiar - a closer reflection of the voters themselves. That's the beauty of representational democracy -- people feel that their interests are truly being spoken for - and hence become more likely to be involved in the political process.

But one or two people alone can not make change in this nation.

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One of the best things to come out of this election season is how gender has re-entered the public arena and political debate. In previous election years, women have been relegated to the background. But in 2008, issues of gender and power are very much in the forefront. Since readers brought so many comments, I am taking today as an opportunity to respond and expand upon some of my arguments.

I chose to center this week’s Table for One on the topic of the “first and only,” because it is an important (but not often discussed) reality that numbers matter. We like to think of ourselves as a fair country, beyond the prejudices of yesteryear, where individuals who work hard will be judged on their merits alone. But in truth, until there are enough diverse females in authority so that a chosen few are not expected to speak for an entire race or gender , those few will continue to carry the burden for all. When more women are running for the presidency, say three or four just like the men, the conversation about gender will be replaced by conversations about each woman’s agenda. With one woman, stereotypes abound; often, that “only” woman either has to prove she is “man enough” for the job or find a way to be “tough enough” without losing her appeal as a woman. It’s almost impossible. That isn’t to say that the particular policy concerns about Hillary Clinton or about President Clinton that readers have expressed would disappear, but the issues around gender would be far less pronounced if two other women governors or senators were in the race. If those gender issues are ones you aren’t seeing, let’s take a quick look at how the media are treating this particular one and only.

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In last week’s New York Times op-ed, “When Women Rule,” Nicholas Kristof referenced a telling case study of Indian women who (by law) form one-third of village council positions. The study found that women ran the villages better than men, but that they were often judged as having done a worst job than their male counterparts – at least when they were the first women on the job. In fact, the study found that by the time the second round of women leaders were elected, they were rated on par with men.

The lesson learned, yet again: first women are inherently judged under a harsher set of standards and face elevated scrutiny than their male peers. But through their service, these trailblazers inevitably shift cultural perceptions of women as leaders.

We’re seeing this now in the race for the presidency, particularly in the male-dominated field of national security.

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Over the course of this election to date, I have read with interest the speculation by many, most recently Maureen Dowd, that the intense scrutiny Hillary Clinton has faced in her candidacy for the democratic nomination may have less to do with her gender than it has to do with some flaw in her personality—her “Clintonianism” as some have put it, or as a result of her being “this woman,” in Dowd’s phrasing.

It’s a clever and disarming argument—except that there’s clear evidence that Clinton’s gender does mean that she is dissected in ways that are unique among the candidates – from the pitch of her voice and the cut of her blouse to the state of her marriage and her general “likeability.” But we don’t just have to look at Hillary Clinton’s candidacy to see what the impact of being the “one and only” woman running for a position of power might be; let’s think back to not that long ago, when a very different woman ran for president. Remember Elizabeth Dole?

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All this week we'll be joined by Marie Wilson, the author of Closing the Leadership Gap and President and Founder of the White House Project. Wilson will be here to offer thoughts on women in politics, and more broadly the obstacles to making our representative government actually representative of the diversity of the country.

Issues of gender and race have clearly been at the center of the current Presidential race, so we thought it would be an apt time to bring in an expert on gender and presidential politics. Wilson isn't here to advocate for either candidate, but hopefully she'll be able to help us better understand the historic and often challenging race we've been watching for the past year.

Back in 1992, in one of Bill Clinton’s many exhibitions of his masterful grasp of spin, he called out Sister Souljah by criticizing her extremist comments during the Democratic primary season in 1992. In doing so, then-Governor Clinton signaled to moderate, undecided voters that he was a centrist, like them, and he’d be an acceptable alternative to the incumbent, President George Bush (No. 41).

In an inverted echo of the Sister Souljah moment from her husband’s first Presidential campaign, Senator Hillary Clinton recently opened the door to the issue of race – but without such positive results. In making the case that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would never have happened but for President Lyndon Johnson, she essentially disparaged the crucial role of every civil rights leader of that era. But for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., The Hon. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. and many others, the pressure required to make voting and civil rights legislation a reality wouldn’t have existed. By the time she stammered her way through this explanation, though, it was too little, too late; Barack Obama’s campaign had fashioned the issue just enough to get the attention of a critical segment of South Carolina’s Democratic primary voters.

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“Sunlight is the best disinfectant” was a vivid analogy made by Justice Louis Brandeis about the benefits of candor and transparency. And that’s the spirit in which I wrote How to Rig An Election. The book is a completely candid account of my personal experience in Republican politics from the inception of the Republican Revolution to its demise in 2006. My objective in the book was to walk the reader through the process by which political campaigns are waged so that the next time they receive a piece of direct mail, see a television commercial, or hear a radio spot they will know why they got it and what the people who sent it to them are trying to make them believe. After reading this book the reader will no longer just react to the message as they are expected to, but rather pause and consider what reaction is anticipated and then perhaps instead act according to what they think – not feel.

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My favorite blog comment about How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative was “Well, that’s refreshing candor from a guy who’s probably going to hell.” It is a favorite because it assumes so much so wrongly.

Setting aside any debate over such a thing as hell, I was never hired by a campaign to be the moral compass. In fact, morality is a slippery slope and not a political dialogue I would willingly enter or incite. I was hired to engineer victory. With so much at stake, morality was not a luxury to be afforded candidates or their staff.

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I think this week’s TPM discussion of Facebook and privacy demonstrates how the basic conception of privacy is evolving. So for starters, before the public decides whether this change is good, we have to figure out what defines the “new privacy.” Otherwise people will just talk past eachother in these debates.

A simple baseline for traditional privacy is that information is only private until you share it. In this model, privacy is binary. Secrets are either kept or disclosed. In “The Right To Privacy,” a seminal 1890 article in the Harvard Law Review, Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren declare:

…disclosure is the one immutable limit on privacy. The right is lost only when the author himself communicates his production to the public – in other words, publishes it.

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Why would young people publicize the very information they want to keep private?

Critics argue that privacy does not matter to children who were raised in a wired celebrity culture that promises a niche audience for everyone. Why hide when you can perform? But even if young people are performing, many are clueless about the size of their audience. That's because the new generation is often proficient with technology it doesn't fully understand. The Carnegie Mellon study found that one-third of students don't realize that it is easy for nonstudents to access their Facebook profiles. And 30 percent of students did not even know they had an option to limit access to their profile.

Most people don't use the privacy settings to limit access to their Facebook profile. Four out of five simply accept the default setting, which allows their whole network to see the entire profile. In the UCLA network, that's 50,400 people. The Boston network has 312,404 people. For comparison, the city's tabloid, the Boston Herald, has a circulation of 201,503. Users may think they're only sharing with the friends they can see, but they're actually publishing with the reach of a newspaper.

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 Facebook is under mounting public pressure over how the company manages and monetizes the personal information of its 58 million users. Fights over how people “control” their online identities are especially important now, since the growth of social networking coincides with a resurgence of government surveillance, including a massive N.S.A. domestic spying program that is widely believed to be illegal. (Senior Bush administration officials have said as much explicitly, in James Comey’s Senate testimony, and implicitly, in their fight to grant retroactive immunity to the telcos.) So naturally, several people have responded to my Facebook article by raising the important connection to government surveillance. TPM reader Reece argues that Facebook qualms are dwarfed by the real Big Brother in Washington:

...neither Facebook nor Visa can toss me in jail. Neither Facebook nor Visa can prosecute me for anything. Neither Facebook nor Visa can accuse me of being a terrorist or keep me in a secret detention center or subject me to torture. I have no doubt that we need more regulation of personal information in the hands of private businesses, and I would like to see that legislation. But I'm always going to be more concerned about the government than I am about Facebook.

A satirical riposte from Wonkette turned on a similar premise:

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When one of America's largest electronic surveillance systems was launched in Palo Alto a year ago, it sparked an immediate national uproar. The new system tracked roughly 9 million Americans, broadcasting their photographs and personal information on the Internet; 700,000 web-savvy young people organized online protests in just days. Time declared it "Gen Y's first official revolution," while a Nation blogger lauded students for taking privacy activism to "a mass scale." Yet today, the activism has waned, and the surveillance continues largely unabated.

Generation Y's "revolution" failed partly because young people were getting what they signed up for. All the protesters were members of Facebook, a popular social networking site, which had designed a sweeping "news feed" program to disseminate personal information that users post on their web profiles. Suddenly everything people posted, from photos to their relationship status, was sent to hundreds of other users in a feed of time-stamped updates. People complained that the new system violated their privacy. Facebook argued that it was merely distributing information users had already revealed. The battle--and Facebook's growing market dominance in the past year--show how social networking sites are rupturing the traditional conception of privacy and priming a new generation for complacency in a surveillance society. Users can complain, but the information keeps flowing.

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