Chris Eberle wants to know . . .

. . . why do we lawyers think it matters what the Founders thought about religion, politics, and public life?  He writes, with respect to our discussion of Geof Stone's recent post on Gov. Romney's speech:

I don't get it: I hear that kind of debate all of the time -- "this is what 'the founders' believed about religion and public life.'  "No, *this* is what they believed."  Etc Etc.  But who cares?  Even if we assume, as is surely not the case, that there was some one position, even broadly construed, that the founders took with respect to the proper public role of religion, of what normative significance is that fact?  After all, suppose that we agree that, as Prof. Stone says, "the Founders were not anti-religion. They understood that religion could help nurture the public morality necessary to a self-governing society. But they also understood that religion was fundamentally a private and personal matter that had no place in the political life of a nation dedicated to the separation of church and state."  Why should that matter to me any more than their belief in Newtonian physics? 

Actually, what I'm really wondering -- and I do wonder, because I think it's perhaps my Protestant individualism and latent hostility to tradition that's blinding me here -- is why two folks from MOJ should think his argument worth responding to.  Is this some kind of Kabuki dance in which lawyers like to participate?  Why waste the effort, other than to say: "Yes, perhaps the founders really did think what you say they thought.  And now that we've mentioned that entirely irrelevant factoid, what should we, now, think about the proper role of religion in the United States?"

Well?  Why do we "waste the effort"?