See what happens to shoddy thinking when it is confronted by clear thinking. It ain’t pretty (if you’re the shoddy thinker).

Apart from the hyperbole, what precisely is new about Stewart’s reading of the founding? It’s not his assertion that the religious views of the most prominent Founders were unorthodox. With apologies to David Barton, there is little evidence that the leading Founders were devout Christians who based their political philosophy primarily on Scripture. Whether we label them “deists” or “theistic rationalists” or “Enlightenment Christians,” no historically sound argument can transform them into card-carrying evangelicals. Nor is Stewart being innovative in claiming that the Founders drew extensively from Enlightenment sources in thinking about the proper structure and function of government. Scholars of the Revolution almost unanimously agree with this, and that includes Christian historians who take religion’s role with great seriousness.

But the predominant view within the academy would complicate each of these conclusions. Scholars typically argue that the leading Founders were unorthodox, but not irreligious. Yes, they found much of value in Enlightenment philosophy, but they gravitated toward the Enlightenment’s more moderate expressions, especially Scottish “Common Sense” writings that could be reconciled with Christianity. And to the degree that they embraced deism or something close to it, they adopted a worldview confined largely to elite intellectuals. They were thus hardly representative of the rank and file of Americans, many of whom had been swept up in the religious enthusiasm of the Great Awakening. In sum, the intellectual influences on the Revolutionary generation were numerous and diverse. Orthodox Christian belief was hardly determinative, but neither was it insignificant.

What distinguishes Nature’s God is that it rejects all such nuance. The essence of the American founding was an ardent secularism, period. Whatever the Founders said for public consumption about freedom of religion, what they really wanted was freedom from religion. In this they were joined by a considerable cross-section of independent-minded patriots. Stewart insists that atheism was widespread in Revolutionary America, and the only reason we don’t remember it is that religious zealots in later years would cover up a historical fact they found embarrassing.

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