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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