http://www.americanrevolution.org/gaustad.html

I stumbled on this article and found it interesting:


http://www.americanrevolution.org/gaustad.html

Sins of the Fathers:
Religion and the Revolution

By Dr. Edwin S. Gaustad

Excerpt:

Fear of a general oppression by institutional religion at constituted a major element of revolutionary ideology. This position, known as deism, was held only by a few in the mid-l8thcentury but it was a powerful few. Most of the founding fathers, sympathetic with and influenced by the European Enlightenment, saw religion - natural religion, that is - as a potential good, but with equal clarity they saw the religions of existing institutions and religions based on a fixed scriptural revelation as meddlesome, wrong-headed and hopelessly obsolete. It was time for a change, change from the dogmatic to the rational, from the supernatural to nature, from priestcraft, pomp and power to humility, simplicity and truth. Reason in religion (and in all the affairs of mankind) would "overturn the empire of superstition and erect upon its ruins a fabric against which the storms of despotism may beat vain."3 These words of Elihu Palmer, written two decades after the Revolution, echoed the sentiments of Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Franklin and others before and during that Revolution: religion must arise from reason and conviction, never from force and favor.