From the New York Times, George Will reviews Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers by Brooke Allen. You can purchase the book here

Not since the medieval church baptized, as it were, Aristotle as some sort of early - very early - church father has there been an intellectual hijacking as audacious as the attempt to present America’s principal founders as devout Christians. Such an attempt is now in high gear among people who argue that the founders were kindred spirits with today’s evangelicals, and that they founded a “Christian nation.”

This irritates Brooke Allen, an author and critic who has distilled her annoyance into “Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers.” It is a wonderfully high’spirited and informative polemic that, as polemics often do, occasionally goes too far. Her thesis is that the six most important founders - Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton - subscribed, in different ways, to the watery and undemanding Enlightenment faith called deism. That doctrine appealed to rationalists by being explanatory but not inciting: it made the universe intelligible without arousing dangerous zeal.

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