Walter Lippmann “The New Republic”—whose founding editor Walter Lippmann outgrew radical “new psychology” to found a conservative “public philosophy” based on natural reason—graced the Fifth of July with a breathless review of some new books arguing that the American founding fathers were flaming “free thinkers.” The purpose of this agnostic bombast was, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision, to stick a finger in the eyes of conservative Christians who see the American founding as a sacred event. In truth, most of the Founders were moderate Deists, meaning that they believed in a benevolent but removed deity who crafted the universe’s natural laws. They had left behind dogmatic Calvinism, but were far removed from the authentic atheism of radical Enlightenment thinkers like Julien Offray de La Mettrie who wrote L’homme machine or “The Human Mechanism” (c. 1750). At the popular level, the American Revolution if not the Constitution was rooted in evangelical religion. There might have been a Revolution without freethinking Tom Paine (who nevertheless admired Quakers), but it would have been impossible without the religious enthusiasm unleashed by George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards and the First Great Awakening that convinced many colonists that George III was the Antichrist. After the Revolution, the Jeffersonian Republican Party relied on the popular support of anti-religious establishment Baptists and Methodists. This is not so surprising given recent scholarship showing that Jefferson himself was not a Deist but a Unitarian who believed in a large moral agency for a heroic if not divine Jesus. After Deism went into eclipse, Unitarianism and “the New England conscience” remained a powerful spur to reform movements including both temperance and antislavery. This history matters because, as far as I know, there has been no human rights movement in American history without a religious dynamic. This was true of Progressive social reform of the early twentieth century and of the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s. It might seem not to be true of the labor movement of the New Deal Era, but even that had a serious theological component in Reinhold Niebuhr and the Catholic Worker Movement. According to the polls, “no belief” in God has increased from the single digits to the middle teens over a generation. The Millennial Generation prefers spiritualism to traditional religion, and the religious right has overreached in its jihad against gay marriage. Even so, I wish the new “New Republic” crowd luck in building a mass movement for social change and human rights around an irreligious or anti-religious platform. All that they are likely to accomplish is help create a void that will be filled by God or Allah knows what.