Andrew Jackson resisted bids in the 1820s to form a \u201cChristian party in politics.\u201d\u009d Abraham Lincoln buried a proposed \u201cChristian amendment\u201d\u009d to the Constitution to declare the nation\u2019s fealty to Jesus. Theodore Roosevelt defended William Howard Taft, a Unitarian, from religious attacks by supporters of William Jennings Bryan.<\/p>\n
The founders were not anti-religion. Many of them were faithful in their personal lives, and in their public language they evoked God. They grounded the founding principle of the nation \u201d\u201d that all men are created equal \u201d\u201d in the divine. But they wanted faith to be one thread in the country\u2019s tapestry, not the whole tapestry.<\/p>\n
In the 1790s, in the waters off Tripoli, pirates were making sport of American shipping near the Barbary Coast. Toward the end of his second term, Washington sent Joel Barlow, the diplomat-poet, to Tripoli to settle matters, and the resulting treaty, finished after Washington left office, bought a few years of peace. Article 11 of this long-ago document says that \u201cas the government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion,\u201d\u009d there should be no cause for conflict over differences of \u201creligious opinion\u201d\u009d between countries.<\/p>\n
The treaty passed the Senate unanimously. Mr. McCain is not the only American who would find it useful reading.<\/p>\n