I've now finished Brooke Allen's Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers, and can offer a verdict:

This simple and well-researched book provides all the evidence you need to show that the American government and its Constitution were not founded on Christian principles. The author demonstrates the essential Enlightenment methods and ideals of founders Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, and the rather vile (my judgment) Realpolitic of Alexander Hamlton, who used religion as a political tool, but spent most of his life in flagrant violation of Christian teaching and community. Then the author puts the thinking of these men in the wider context of their times. We've come a long way from the time when Baptists and Methodists could prefer an alleged atheist for president to a suspected Presbyterian! This long way has not been good. We can see how badly America has progressed under the onslaught of a series of disastrous spiritual awakenings.

There are a few problems with the book, however. The author seems to be a little too trusting of the what Alexander Hamilton wrote. The man was a player, and the letters she quotes from him were almost certainly carefully worded to the point of deception. It was sort of embarrassing to read her brief analysis of Hamilton's strange last letter, the letter that exonerated him in the people's mind, and condemned the man who sought to duel with him, Aaron Burr.

Further, her coverage of Tom Paine strikes me as woefully inadequate and not altogether trustworthy. Not including Paine in her list of founders was, I think, a mistake. Frankly, had she incorporated her wider history of the Enlightenment in a chapter on Paine following the chapter on Hamilton, it would have been a much better book.

But still, it is a very good book.

That being said, what I like best of the book is her quotation from Seneca: Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful. I had forgotten this little gnome, and I am quite happy, now, to have it in my permanent repertoire of maxims. Seneca, in one elegant sentence puts religion in politics in the clearest light.

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