FAITH + REASON

The founders who wrote that oath might also have been surprised to see this week’s combination of church and state. While deeply religious themselves, two centuries of sectarian violence in Europe rendered them nervous about linking the state to any one religious sect.

Not only did they leave God out of the Constitution — they didn’t even mention Jesus Christ once during the constitutional negotiations in Philadelphia, according to Lambert.

Lambert said religious conservatives formed their own institutions and publishing houses and study groups, which later became the engine of a political revolution.

The transformation was exemplified by the late Rev. Jerry Falwell.

Until the 1960s, he insisted preachers were meant to win souls, not elections.

But Republican activists realized they shared much in common with conservative religious groups — aghast over abortion; resentful of the federal role in education.

They blocked the women’s rights constitutional amendment, fought a gay-rights ordinance in south Florida and fumed in 1975 when Bob Jones University lost its taxexempt status because of racial segregation.

By 1980, Falwell boasted that his Moral Majority group had helped elect Ronald Reagan: “The political landscape is spectacularly altered.”