Mitt Romney, in his much-anticipated speech on religion, invoked the memory of the Founders. As a rhetorical gimmick, this is a slam dunk. In EVERY country, EVERY politician invokes the memory of the leaders of the last successful revolution. It's practically a pre-requisite for public life. Let's take a look at what the Founders really believed.
The Founders, for the most part, were not Christians at all, they were Deists. (Deism is out of style these days, but a reasonable modern equivalent would be Unitarian Universalism.) The US did not have a Christian president until 1829, when Andrew Jackson took office, half a century after Independence.
Thomas Jefferson, for example, wrote the Jefferson Bible, which praises Jesus as a moral teacher, but never mentions the miracles or the Resurrection. For a Christian, the Resurrection is not exactly a minor detail.
Thomas Paine wrote The Age of Reason, one of the most anti-religious books of all time. The backlash against this book has been cited as one of the causes of the Second Great Awakening, the religious revival that led, among other things, to Mormonism!
For a Mormon politician to invoke the memory of the Founders in a speech on religion is just a little bit hilarious. Good politics, bad history.
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