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Entry: Wolfe's Howl Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/wolfes_folly#2025 Post contents: Mr. Wheeler - It is bootless to try to discern uniform theologcal or political outlook amongst America's Founders. They ran the gamut from Charles Carroll of Carrollton, a Roman Catholic landowner from Maryland, to John Witherspoon, a clergyman of the established Chuch of Scotland, and president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University); from the Unitarian Federalist lawyer from Boston, John Adams, to the conventionally Anglican Federalist Virginia planter, George Washington, to the mildly anti-Federalist Deist Jefferson to the strongly anti-Federalist advocate of established Anglicanism, Patrick Henry. The significance of Freemasonry in the American Revolution has also been much overstated. Roman Catholic anathemas against Freemasonry, which you seem to have in mind, were promulgated with the politicized and anticlerical Freemasonry of France and Italy in mind. British freemasonry lost whatever political content it had after the failed Jacobite rising of 1745, and never was anti-clerical in the way the Continental variety was. Although Washington and Lafayette were Freemasons, so were Lord Cornwallis and the Duke of Sussex (one of the sons of George III). Its net effect, insofar as the American Revolution is concerned, was insignificant and neutral. To apply the description "nihilist" to Carroll, Witherspoon, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Henry - as if they had anything in common with Raskolnikov - is merely to render it meaningless, in the way other such epithets, e.g., "racist" or "anti-Semite," become, when too broadly used. Sent at: 2008 07 04