E-mail (I’ll have to defer to Rick Brookhiser and Michael Novak on the correctness of the history here):

Mr. Lowry;
…It can safely be said that three of the most enormous “faith based” initiatives in American history are of course, the abolitionist movement that led to civil war, the culmination of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, and one of the most misunderstood, the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence. Both of these American historical happenings find their etymology in the mid to late 1750s with what became known as “The Great Awakening”. This is a little understood movement that swept all of the colonies, and is somewhat akin to what we would call “evangelical fervor” or perhaps a “personal” relationship with the Lord which superseded the dominion of the King of England as the head of the church (read Anglican/Episcopalian). When the young men who were affected by “The Great Awakening” came to their respective majorities, they could not help being influenced by this movement. That is why Jefferson (and Adams) referred to, in the Declaration of Independence, that we are endowed by our Creator. In other words, we were only answerable, if we were answerable to anyone at all, to our God, and not to some titular head of state. We have always been taught “Give me liberty or give me death”, or “no taxation without representation”, are just some of the reasons that gave rise to our independence. However, to me, the moral underpinning of the whole revolutionary endeavor, was the term “faith based”…

Another (truncated for space) e-mail from a friend on the British history and the intertwining of Christianity and the Enlightenment:

…very, very Christian peoples-the Italians of the 1400′s, the Brits of the 1600′s, the Russians of, well, everything before the last 40 years of the 19th century, had massive amounts of slavery and they rarely if ever did a goddamn thing about it. Abolition started in the Enlightenment, it started then for a reason, and if right-wing Christians today blind themselves to those reasons they don’t deserve to be taken seriously.
O.K., but having gotten all that out, it is equally incumbent on me to say the following: the Enlightenment itself was often a *Christian* Enlightenment. Voltaire, in addition to being ajack-ass (note that while he railed against slavery in the West, he lavished praise on Catherine II, the greatest enslaver of people in history-no one else, all by him/herself, made like 10,000,000 people slaves, but Catherine did that when she made the final 1/3 of Russia enserfed) is an anomaly. The Christian-ness of the Enlightenment is especially true in Britain, and then doubly especially in America; and it is less true in France, Prussia, Italy, etc. But it is true there too. Montesquieu, Kant, and yes, even Rousseau, never understood themselves as non-Christian in the way that [secularists] are painting them; they would have recoiled at they way they are described today.
Also, we must understand that the evangelical phase of the Protestant Reformation in many, many ways brought out the very best in Europe (again, most especially in the British Empire), and here again, this is a hybrid phenomenon. Evangelical/low church Anglicans (like Locke) would have never understood their Protestantism to be *opposed* to their being the leading men of the Enlightenment… Both the Reformation and the Enlightenment were often about simply not believing something until you could be convinced of it yourself in good conscience. In the long run this became totally common in Catholicism as well, as the hagiography of Thomas More and his final stand shows.
The fact is the abolitionism that produced someone like Wilberforce is *both* radically Christian *and* radically part of the Enlightenment. It is inconceivable that men like Wilberforce would have done what they did if they did not think that Christ’s Love brought them to do it; it is inconceivable that such personal, self-questioning, use-of-reason-readings-of-the-Bible, conversion experiences would have occurred were it not for the Enlightenment’s emphasis on Reason that eventually all the best men of the British Empire-and Europe-endorsed….