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This is great stuff, and I have read "America's Revolutionary Mind." Thank you!

Here are my thoughts on this:

In summary, "the sleep of reason produces monsters" (Goya, circa 1799.) The founding generation understood this, thanks to reading Locke, Bacon, Newton, and other thinkers who turned to a reliance on reason rather than revelation to determine truth.

So although the founding generation was overwhelmingly Christian, they understood that faith is a private matter but in matters pertaining to the public good, only reason should be the arbiter of disputes. This is because that once we abandon reason, anything can be asserted, anything can be justified, and the only defense can ever be: "because we believe it." This is a dangerous stance for the public realm; it's perfectly fine in the private realm. It's fine to have discussions of faith at home, in the church, or in associations that aren't specifically public. But they don't belong in political discourse because once the door is open to assertions that can't be logically refuted, then anything at all can be asserted and defended on non-logical grounds: the monsters of the sleep of reason.

But, it's not as if we need logicians at every public discourse. This is really a simple matter that the founding generation understood well: we all have the innate ability to reason; we all have the light of reason. This light is built on the simple recognition of identity and contradiction, applicable to real-life (i.e., the logic of building a bridge) as well as to discourse. It's simple but profound; basic logic can be recognized by anyone ("that doesn't make any sense!") and yet untangling bad logic can be an elaborate and sophisticated task, requiring specialists.

Why do we separate church and state? Because matters of faith can't be defended publicly by rational discourse, and the state should be based on reason. Otherwise monsters arise; this might be an insight that the founding generation knew well, but that we have forgotten.

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You claim or seem to claim a founding that is basically rationally secular and also a founding that is basically rationally secular and religious. Further, you justify this contradiction or important difference with the Constitutional protection of (rights-respecting) religion. But that protection is merely an application of rights, not a respect for the religionist use of that right. Iran has a religious constitution that protects speech that is consistent with Islam!

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The other problem with the TradCon position is that it doesn't even work on a superficial level. Why would you need a "Christian" revolution? What would be revolutionary about it?

Why setup Congress and the Senate and all these mechanisms for restricting the governments authority, thereby restricting Gods authority on earth? Why even secede from Britain in the first place? Americans already had everything they wanted, according to TradCon values, by being British subjects.

Their positions are wrong on the face of it.

Ultimately TradCon's are old-school, European-style tribalists/leftists, so when they take on titles like "America First" it's becomes beyond parody.

As they are so fond of telling immigrants, who tend to understand America much better than TradCons do, perhaps it is the TradCons that should consider "going back to where they came from."

They are profoundly and hopelessly anti-American.

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I loved it up to that last sentence. I'll have to think about it, but it somehow doesn't feel right to end with that absurdity ...

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