This year, lots of fireworks over the Founders' faith

Such debates are hardly trivial for a nation navigating where religion belongs in public. Washington's support for religious expression, including Catholics and Jews, reflected his Christian commitment to tolerance toward other faiths, according to Bob Morrison, vice president for academic affairs at the Family Research Council, a conservative Christian advocacy group in Washington. He says even the well-known doubter Thomas Jefferson approved of holding worship inside the House of Representatives and invited ministries to the campus of the University of Virginia.

Public spaces were "very open, very welcoming" to religion in the early republic, Mr. Morrison says. "Now there's a militant hostility to every public expression of faith. I don't see any support among the Founders for that."

Others see the Founders as guardians against an encroaching religious establishment, both in their time and today. "These are essentially secular people who founded our country," says Jo Ann Miller, editor of Richard Brookhiser's "What Would the Founders Do?" Some on the political left say the Founders' devotion to reason first and foremost is crucial to remember in a time when religiously inspired activists try to require critiques of evolution in public schools or to restrict public funding for scientific research, as in the case of embryonic stem cells.

"It's important for Americans to be in touch with that spirit of toleration, of respect for science and free inquiry, that most of the Founding Fathers believed in," says Roger Hickey, codirector of the Campaign for America's Future, a liberal advocacy group in Washington.

What strikes Professor Wolfe as remarkable is the degree to which academic historians have entered the fray in an attempt to referee this ideological tug-of-war. Among them is Gordon Wood, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian at Brown University and author of "Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different." He says their public square was far more saturated with expressions of faith than is today's.

"They didn't anticipate religion retreating as much from the public square as we've done in the 20th and 21st centuries," Wood says. "The modern notion that we're being overtaken by a theocracy and that evangelical Christians are running amok – I think that's just kind of a madness that comes from people who have no historical perspective."

Still, attempts to cast the Founders as evangelical Christians are as misguided as those to make them seem entirely unreligious, says David Holmes, a church historian at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va., and author of "The Faiths of the Founding Fathers." He says the most prominent Founders were deists of varied strains, which means nobody gets to claim their exclusive religious legacy.

"I hope the evangelicals [who claim Founders as their own kind] and the people who say the Founders were atheists or agnostics," Professor Holmes says, "will do more reading."

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