Matthew Stewart wants to make one thing perfectly clear: The United States was not founded as a Christian nation. The principles that inspired the American Revolution, he argues in \u201cNature\u2019s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic,\u201d belong to an intellectual tradition dating to ancient Greece and reviled by every variety of Christian \u2014 early church fathers, Catholic clergy and Protestant divines alike. Yet Spinoza the radical, no less than Locke the moderate, shaped an agnostic world view that shook America loose from Britain. Stewart pays particular attention to two fire-breathers \u2014 Ethan Allen, surprise conqueror of Ft. Ticonderoga, and Thomas Young, instigator of the Boston Tea Party \u2014 as the most outspoken proponents of a heterodox creed shared by (at minimum) Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and George Washington. Contemporaries called them deists when not calling them infidels or atheists, and Stewart devotes considerable care to explaining that Deism, the philosophical engine of the Revolution, is not the Christianity Lite some 21st century conservatives have proclaimed it.<\/p>\n
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