Above all, he makes the vital point that when faith is politically weaponized, religion itself is “weakened and tainted.” He recalls Benjamin’s Franklin’s argument—as incisive today as it was more than 200 years ago—that when “a Religion is good, I conceive that it will support itself; and when it cannot support itself, and God does not take care to support [it], so that its Professors are oblig’d to call for the help of the Civil Power, ’tis a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one.”
