Birds on the Brain

If today’s religious rightists want to find evangelical fervor in founding-era America, they don’t have to rope in men like Washington, whose regard for something called Providence seems to me about as nonevangelical and nonmillenarian as it gets. There were real evangelicals in the founding period, with politics really biblically inspired. Herman Husband and the North Carolina Regulators are among them. But because the right’s free-market ideology is diametrically opposed to founding evangelicals’ efforts to get government to restrain wealth and legislate equality, Christian conservatives don’t know about them, and the right goes on vainly trying to make our great founding rationalists into holy rollers.