Faith & Spirit Quote by Mortimer Adler

Adler lands the punch with a historian’s calm and a polemicist’s timing: “embarrassing” doesn’t describe the presidents so much as the storytellers who came later, eager to retrofit the early republic into a church-friendly origin myth. The sentence is built like a trap. By framing the “problem” as belonging to “champions of the Christian faith,” he shifts the burden of awkwardness onto the activists and apologists who want the founders as proof texts, not onto the founders themselves.

The key move is “orthodox.” Adler isn’t claiming Washington through Adams were atheists, nor is he playing the cheap gotcha of labeling them godless. He’s tightening the definition so it can’t be wriggled out of: whatever their personal piety, their theological profiles (deism, rational religion, Enlightenment moralism, heterodox Christianity) don’t neatly line up with later evangelical or creedal expectations. That single adjective exposes a larger cultural mismatch: early American public religion often prized providence, virtue, and natural law over doctrinal specificity, and politics leaned on moral consensus more than confessional identity.

Context matters: Adler, a Catholic intellectual steeped in “great books” thinking, is wary of propaganda masquerading as history. He’s also writing into a twentieth-century landscape where “America is a Christian nation” rhetoric became a political instrument. The subtext is less anti-Christian than anti-fable: if your faith needs presidential sainthood to validate itself, you’ve already conceded that the argument isn’t theological - it’s civic branding.