Founding Faith Quotes

“The Founding Faith, then, was not Christianity, and it was not secularism. It was religious liberty—a revolutionary formula for promoting faith by leaving it alone.”
― Steven Waldman, Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America

“How ineffective must be the churches--and parents--if you rely on the public schools as the only way to keep your children away from depravity!”
― Steven Waldman, Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America

“Freedom of conscience means not only the freedom to believe but also the freedom to change - not only the right to practice one faith but also the right to a spiritual journey. The Founders didn't just champion religious freedom - they used it. Franklin, Washington, Jefferson, Adams, and Madison never stopped examining - passionately, combatively, wisely - life's deepest questions. Each journey was distinctive, but they ended up in similar places, still deeply spiritual but with an ever-shortening list of required religious creeds. The older they got, the simpler their faith became.”
― Steven Waldman, Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America

“Long before Emma Lazarus welcomed the tired and poor, Washington declared that the 'bosom of America [was] open to receive, the oppressed and persecuted of all Nations and Religions, whom we shall welcome to a participation of all our rights and privileges.”
― Steven Waldman, Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America

“In light of the unbroken record of invoking God's name in foundational documents throughout the world, throughout the colonies, and throughout history, the stubborn refusal of the US Constitution to invoke the Almighty is abnormal, historic, radical, and not accidental. But liberals miss a basic point, too: The framers of the Constitution were not contemplating the role of "government" in religion. They were debating the role of the national government in religion.”
― Steven Waldman, Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America

“. 'In religion itself there is nothing mysterious to its author,' Madison wrote in 1792. 'The mystery lies in the dimness of the human sight.' If it is ultimately impossible for mortals to know God's mind, the history of persecution becomes cosmically tragic - two thousand years of dogmatic men burning one another over religious ideas whose veracity only God can know.”
― Steven Waldman, Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America

“Jefferson believed that a secret to religious freedom was destroying the concept of heresy, the crime of expressing unauthorized religious thought. And he cared deeply - personally, passionately - about heresy because, in the context of his times, Thomas Jefferson as a heretic, and wanted to live in a nation that tolerated men like him.”
― Steven Waldman, Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America

“The New World was settled [by Europeans] to promote Christianity. For more than 150 years, colonial governments actively supported the dominant faith. Less acknowledged today is a point well understood by the Founding Fathers: Nearly all of these experiments in state encouragement of religion failed.”
― Steven Waldman, Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America

“Most powerfully, Madison argued that state support for religion would wound religion because real faith must flow from a free mind, without even an ounce of coercion. Whether we like it or not, believers have no right or ability to force belief upon others. “Whilst we assert for ourselves a freedom to embrace, to profess and to observe the Religion which we believe to be of divine origin, we cannot deny an equal freedom to those whose minds have not yet yielded to the evidence which has convinced us.” Faith coerced is not true faith. “If this freedom be abused, it is an offence against God, not against man.”
― Steven Waldman, Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America

“The mind, as Jefferson reminded us, is the only oracle God gave us. Jefferson wanted people less dependent on the Bible; I would extend the idea, and urge us to be less dependent on Jefferson. Many modern church-state questions fall into a constitutional gray zone, and squinting at the founding documents with greater intensity will not change that.”
― Steven Waldman, Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America

“The New World was settled to promote Christianity. For more than 150 years, colonial governments actively supported the dominant faith. Less acknowledged today is a point well understood by the Founding Fathers: Nearly all of these experiments in state encouragement of religion failed.”
― Steven Waldman, Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America