Althouse on Madison on Religion

Professor Ann Althouse has an excellent post, dealing with James Madison's views on church-state relations and religious freedom, and responding to a misguided polemic -- "a collection of decontextualized quotes of various founding fathers saying things that are antagonistic to religion," in Althouse's words -- in a recent issue of The Nation.  Althouse's point, in a nutshell, is that Madison's arguments for church-state separation (like those of many in the Founding era and before) were (generally speaking) not anti-religious, or even (what we today might call) "secularist."  Instead, these arguments tended to emphasize the importance of religion, and the importance to religion of legal constraints on the power of government to exploit and regulate it.

Rick