We know that both Baruch Spinoza and John Locke profoundly influenced the founders’ thinking. Berated as an atheist and drummed out of Jewish society in Holland, Spinoza thought religion “in the highest degree necessary for the common people who lack the ability to perceive things clearly and distinctly.”42 Locke thought that for the “vulgar” and the “mass of mankind” it was better to have divine rules than to “leave it to the long, and sometimes intricate deductions of Reason, to be made out [by] them. Such trains of reasonings the greatest part of mankind have neither the leisure to weigh;
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