Why did the nation’s founders suddenly fear a godless republic?

(RNS) — As this month comes to a close on the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding, it’s worth noting how little the founders talked about religion. And their blithe unconcern evolved into manifest anxiety not so much because of a change in philosophy so much as fear.

Here, for example, is what John Adams had to say in his “Defence of the Constitutions of the United States,” which he wrote between 1787 and 1788 while serving as ambassador to England.

“It will never be pretended that any persons employed in [the designing American governments] had any interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the inspiration of heaven, any more than those at work upon ships or houses, or labouring in merchandize or agriculture: it will forever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses.”

Ten years later, Adams, as president, sounded a different note in a letter to the officers of the Massachusetts militia. “Avarice, Ambition Revenge or Galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net,” he wrote. “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People.”

Similarly, in…