American Creation

For some time I have featured the work of Columbia law professor Philip Hamburger's "Separation of Church and State" with critical commentary. I just hope my criticisms are fair.
The chapter to that book entitled A Theologically Liberal, Anti-Catholic, and American Principle is available online in its entirety so readers can decide for themselves if I'm being fair. I stand by my assessment; Hamburger is a brilliant scholar who...

March 10, 1797: George and Martha Washington leave the President's House in Philadelphia for a much-anticipated retirement at Mount Vernon.
To celebrate George Washington's retirement from the presidency, Philadelphia displayed a life-size painting showing Washington leaving a sword and helmet—symbols of power—at America's feet as he gestures towards Mount Vernon....

Philip Hamburger's book "Separation of Church and State" turns 20 years old in 2022. Hamburger is a brilliant scholar and Ivy League Professor of Law (Columbia), and as such his work is always well worth engaging.
But over the years that I've engaged with this work in particular, I've noted how, as meticulously researched as the book is, it makes very contentious, even if interesting arguments. In 2020, writing in Newsweek, Hamburger summarizes his book in the...

"Good and wise men, in all ages, have embraced a very dissimilar theory. They have supposed, that the deity, from the relations, we stand in, to himself and to each other, has constituted an eternal and immutable law, which is, indispensibly, obligatory...