Rich: It’s a big and tangled topic, and I already suspect I’m going to regret posting this, but I smell some “historical recruitment” going on there with your readers telling us how Christian the American Revolution was. The Enlightenment was shot through with deep skepticism towards the truths of revealed religion. Voltaire and Gibbon were by no means outliers.

I’ve just been reading Brooke Allen’s book Moral Minority, which gives a lot of fascinating details. For sure, many of those who fought for independence were very pious. On Brooke’s account, though, none of the six Big Names she discusses in detail (Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton) would be at ease in an evangelical meeting, either of their own time or of ours. (Let alone–good grief!–a Catholic Mass.)

I will defer to Rick Brookhiser on all points of history here. I would like to say, however, that this business of “recruiting” historical figures to one’s pet cause is deplorable. It was pioneered by the homosexualists, who wrote numberless tomes to convince us that everyone of consequence in history, from Julius Caesar to Abraham Lincoln, was “gay.” It’s silly stuff, and I am sorry to see Christians engaging in it.

Since I’ve already incited 10,000 emails, I’ll go the whole distance here and say that when Christian apologists do acknowledge the skepticism of the Founders, it often drives them into something close to anti-Americanism. As an illustration, consider this reader’s letter in the current (March ‘07) issue of the Paleocon-Catholic magazine Chronicles:

“In his review of Gordon S. Wood’s Revolutionary Characters … James O. Tate avers that ‘we need to recover a vital connection to the spirit of the Founding Fathers…’ He notes that Wood identifies that spirit, but nowhere in the review does he describe it. That spirit was anti-Catholic–a marriage of rationalism, naturalism, and secularism, the bitter fruits of Protestant and Enlightenment ideas, because of their redefinition of human nature and freedom.
“Why should I, a Catholic born in America, want to reconnect with Thomas Jefferson, who, in a letter to John Adams on April 11, 1823, wrote, ‘And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with all this artificial scaffolding’?
“Going back to Washington, Franklin (both Freemasons), and the rest of their ilk will not resuscitate America. We must divorce ourselves from adoration of those revolutionaries, and return to Him Who declared, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life.’ It is only in this way that we can become His temporal isntruments for the restoration of the good, the beautiful, and the true in our land.”

Perhaps there should be an Anti-Founders Club, in which the likes of this gent could hobnob with their leftist equivalents, people who disdain the Founders as slave-holders.

(I did not mean any slight on Chronicles, by the way, a magazine I much admire, which always has thought-provoking stuff in it at a high level of cerebrality. This same issue, for example, has a piece on the “Polonization” of Ireland–the great flood of people from Poland into the Irish Republic, which is having all sorts of odd consequences, and has not been much reported eslewhere.)