So, at the advice of a proselytizing preacher, two government officials—one with a religious agenda so all-consuming he was trying to amend the Constitution to honor his god—deliberately used the time of “national peril and danger,” when people were too busy dying for the Constitution to protect it from a rear-guard assault, to promote their personal religion. Even if this addition were not decades after the founding, it’s hard to see how three men betraying a founding principle—keeping state and church separate—is itself a founding principle. Watkinson, Pollock, and Chase took advantage of a
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