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WHY SHOULD we care what the Founding Fathers believed, or did not believe, about religion?
1st sentence of Chapter:
WHY SHOULD we care what the Founding Fathers believed, or did not believe, about religion?
Even Thomas Paine, the most explicitly anti-Christian of the lot, wrote The Age of Reason as a defense of god from those who traduced him in man-made screeds like the Bible.
There is a germ of religion in human nature so strong that whenever an order of men can persuade the people by flattery or terror that they have salvation at their disposal, there can be no end to fraud, violence, or usurpation.
The connection between religious skepticism and political liberty may not be as absolute as that last allusion implies, but there is no doubt that some such connection existed very vividly in the minds of those “men of the Enlightenment” who adorned Philadelphia and Boston and New York and Washington as the eighteenth century evolved into the nineteenth.
In a first-class closing chapter on the intellectual and scientific world that shaped the Framers, Allen discusses the wide influence then exerted by great humanist thinkers like Hume, Shaftesbury, Bolingbroke, Locke, and Voltaire.
