Throughout the book, Leeman maintains that the consensus between Protestant and Enlightenment thought has produced a confusion that is now eroding the very religious liberty the American founders sought to protect. As the culture wars escalate, so does the possibility the constitutional order established to prohibit religious persecution will actually be used against religious people whose theological beliefs lie outside a rapidly expanding cultural consensus.
Herein lies the looming crisis. Sooner or later the cultural consensus will not hold, and decisions must be made. Those decisions (also known as laws) will directly impact and curtail religious belief and expression in the nation. Not naïve to the coming crisis, Leeman believes the answer will not be to simply return “to the Founders or to Locke as a solution to the culture wars.”
Rather, he believes the United States is seeing the fulfillment of the prediction made by George Washington and John Adams of what would happen “should their philosophy of government be inhabited by an unreligious and unvirtuous people.” Why? Because “churches do not need to take up arms against the state in order to pose a threat to the state; they only need to oppose the gods upon which a nation’s political and economic institutions depend.” And oppose them they do.
How Local Churches Anger The God Of Government – The Federalist
