Religious Intent

Waldman’s conclusion is that “the Founding Faith ... was not Christianity, and it was not secularism. It was religious liberty — a revolutionary formula for promoting faith by leaving it alone.”


FOUNDING FAITH: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America.
By Steven Waldman.
277 pp. Random House. $26.



(RICHARD BROOKHISER NYTBR) - Nothing about the founders seems as interesting or as timely to us, 200 years and more farther on, as their religious views — who, if Anyone, they worshiped, how they marked the boundaries of church and state. As a Washington biographer, I have been assured, during the Q. and A. periods after talks, that George Washington saw the Virgin Mary at Valley Forge and converted to Roman Catholicism on his deathbed (why wait, if he had seen the Virgin 21 years earlier?). I was also once asked if he was an “illuminated Freemason”; I sped away from that question as fast as possible. Continued

Photo: Fallston Presbyterian Church, Fallston, Maryland. Canon EOS 30D & EF-S 17-55 f/2.8 IS lens.