Everybody's favorite authority, Alexis de Tocqueville (writing in 1835, the year of John Marshall's death and the year before that of James Madison, last of the Founding Fathers), elaborately stressed the centrality of Christianity in America. For example he wrote: "For the Americans the ideas of Christianity and liberty are so completely mingled that it is almost impossible to get them to conceive of the one without the other." "The religious atmosphere of the country was the first thing that struck me on arrival in the United States." And he described the frontiersman of the 1830s as "a very civilized man prepared for a time to face life in the forest, plunging into the wildernesses of the New World with his Bible, ax, and newspapers."⁹   

In the second volume of his famous work, Tocqueville had not changed his mind and wrote in 1840, in chapter one: "It was religion that gave birth to the English colonies in America. One must never forget that. In the United States religion is mingled with all the national customs and all those feelings which the word fatherland evokes . . . . Christianity has kept a strong hold over the minds of Americans . . . [I]ts power is . . . that of a religion believed in without discussion . . . . Christianity itself is an established and irresistible fact which no one seeks to attack or to defend. Since the Americans have accepted the main dogmas of the Christian religion without examination, they are bound to receive in like manner a great number of moral truths derived therefrom and attached thereto."¹⁰  

But we somehow manage to forget or explain it away with an ease reminiscent of the oblivion hole of Orwell's Ingsoc.¹¹ Facts and truth are pesky, inconvenient things for those whose agendas cannot stand the light of day.

John Adams writing to Thomas Jefferson in their old age found the heart of the revolutionary American community to lie in the universally accepted "'general principles of Christianity" shared by all, by which he chiefly meant the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount, and in the "general principles of English and American Liberty, in which all those young men united [who fought the Revolution], and which had united all parties in America, in majorities sufficient to assert and maintain her Independence. Now I will avow [Adams continued], that I then believed, and "now believe, that those general Principles of Christianity are as eternal and immutable as the Existence and attributes of God; and those principles of liberty are as unalterable as human nature and our terrestrial, mundane system."¹² Jefferson elsewhere explained that the latter were set forth in the Declaration of Independence, upon which all Whigs at the time had agreed.

When some inkling of Jefferson's deep if heterodox religious convictions leaked out with discovery of his work on the New Testament (The Philosophy of Jesus and The Life and Morals of Jesus, in which he excerpted and studied the Gospels in the various ancient and modern languages),¹³ his resolute study of the Bible, biblical scholarship, church fathers, and other theological literature in Greek, Latin, French, and English, he was urged to make his convictions known to the public, to publish his religious sentiments. In 1824 (two years before his death), Jefferson declined in a letter to George Thatcher and wrote: "But have they not the Gospel? If they hear not that, and the charities it teacheth, neither will they be persuaded though one rose from the dead."¹⁴