Published 2006

“The great news about America—the American gospel, if you will—is that religion shapes the life of the nation without strangling it. Belief in God is central to the country’s experience, yet for the broad center, faith is a matter of choice, not coercion, and the legacy of the Founding is that the sensible center holds. It does so because the Founders believed themselves at work in the service of both God and man, not just one or the other. Driven by a sense of providence and an acute appreciation of the fallibility of humankind, they created a nation in which religion should not be singled out for special help or particular harm. The balance between the promise of the Declaration of Independence, with its evocation of divine origins and destiny, and the practicalities of the Constitution, with its checks on extremism, remains perhaps the most brilliant American success.”

“In our finest hours we have been neither wholly religious nor wholly secular but have drawn on both traditions.”

Jefferson penned the Virginia statute for religious freedom in 1777:

“Whereas Almighty God hath created the mind free”

Washington called God “that Almighty Being who rules over the universe”

“Human beings are what scholars refer to as homo religiosus: we are by nature inclined to look outside ourselves and beyond time and space to a divine power (or, as in antiquity, powers) that creates, directs, and judges the world and our individual lives. ‘All men,’ said Homer, ‘need the gods.’”

“Our finest hours—the Revolutionary War, abolition, the expansion of the rights of women, fights against terror and tyranny, the battle against Jim Crow—can partly be traced to religious ideas about liberty, justice, and charity. Yet theology and scripture have also been used to justify our worst hours—from enslaving black people to persecuting Native Americans to treating women as second-class citizens.”

“The wall Jefferson referred to is designed to divide church from state, not religion from politics.”

[Franklin described his own faith thus:]

“I believe in one God, creator of the universe. That he governs it by his Providence. That he ought to be worshipped. That the most acceptable service we can render to him is doing good to his other children. That the soul of man is immortal, and will be treated with justice in another life respecting its conduct in this. These I take to be the fundamental principles of all sound religion, and I regard them as you do, in whatever sect I meet with them. As to Jesus of Nazareth…I think the system of morals and his religion as he left them to us, the best the world ever saw, or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting changes, and I have…some doubts as to his divinity; though it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the truth with less trouble.”