The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American

by Andrew L. Seidel

“one would be hard put to demonstrate the ways [Thomas] Paine’s rationalistic religion or deism differed from the religious views of his contemporaries Franklin or Jefferson” and that such views “were common among the liberal-thinking gentlemen of the era.”37 While Paine was open about his views, expounding them in The Rights of Man, “Jefferson and other elites” confined their views to that elite circle, fearing that spreading them might undermine society’s moral order.38 While “gentlemen” such as Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Adams, and Franklin were “free of the prejudices, parochialism, and religious enthusiasm of the vulgar and barbaric,” the laity was not.39 Their attitude toward plebeians was patrician, as Wood points out. Washington referred to the masses as the “grazing multitude,” Adams spoke of the “common herd of mankind” or “common persons” with no idea of “Learning, Eloquence, and Genius,” and Gouverneur Morris thought they had “no morals but their own interests.”40