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Can we please stipulate that words like "Deist" or "Theist" or even "Gnostic" are mostly just that: words, meaning very little to most people, indeed if even one in a hundred can distinguish between a "deist" and a "theist", I'd be amazed.... So we are here throwing those words around, as if they had deep and profound meanings which everybody understands and agrees to — but they don't.

Well, you're probably right about that, dear BroJoeK.

On the other hand, there is this:

I have always had to explain to the students at the beginning of my seminars all my life: There is no such thing as a right to be stupid; there is no such thing as a right to be illiterate; there is no such thing as a right to be incompetent. — Ellis Sandoz, "Editor's Introduction," The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol. 34: Autobiographical Reflections, 2006, p. 6.

On an earlier post, you wrote:

But there is a much larger point here, one which I am ill-equipped to defend, but certainly needs a strong defense: our Founders did not found our uniquely free, constitutionally limited federal republic because of their Christian heritage and despite their Freemasonry, but just the opposite.

You lose me right there, dear friend. I just do not see any evidence you could possibly come up with from American historical, cultural experience to defend such a notion. But I'll be glad to hear you out, if you want to try to persuade me otherwise.

What I find most perplexing is this: With you, any question seems to be resolvable only on the terms of Aristotle's Third Law, the Law of the Excluded Middle. It must always be a case of "either/or" with you, when I just see a clear case of "both" in operation.

Christianity goes to the root of American order. To say that the genius of the American order consists in very large degree to its insistence on not having any kind of institutionalized Church does not mean that Americans just routinely want to dispatch God out of their lives.

Anyhoot, must run for now, dear BroJoeK. Perhaps there is more to say on this issue; but the fact of the matter is, right now, I have a pot of chili on the stove which requires my attention, so that I might serve a delicious meal to my hungry husband tonight.

So I will go attend to that, for now,

But hope to be speaking with you again soon!

Thank you so much for writing, and for your kind words!

betty boop: "You lose me right there, dear friend.
I just do not see any evidence you could possibly come up with from American historical, cultural experience to defend such a notion.
But I'll be glad to hear you out, if you want to try to persuade me otherwise."

Thanks so much for a refreshingly reasonable question.

It's not complicated and you already put your finger on it at least once.
When I was a boy, my grandfather told me: "people say Christianity was tried and it failed.
Well, it was never really tried."

Today I'd say that both were right.

"Tried and failed" refers to state religions, beginning with the Roman Empire around 326 AD all the way into early modern times, where people were persecuted & murdered for "crimes" of heresy, apostasy, infidelity, etc.

"Never tried" refers to what my grandfather considered the "true principles" of Christianity, which have less to do with types of government than with our individual virtues or vices.

Our Founders explicitly rejected state religions because, in their eyes and in ours, such had already "been tried and failed."

But our Founders clearly understood that their own Constitution would only work for good people motivated by high ideals such as are taught in churches.

Does that clarify?