An Atheist for President?

Raising the atheist specter against presidential candidates has been a tried-and-true part of the attack apparatus in American politics from the beginning. The sometime Anglican, mostly deist Thomas Jefferson was relentlessly assailed as a howling atheist who would destroy the biblical and Christian foundations of the republic. For many American Christians, the election of Jefferson in 1800 was apocalyptic; the political and moral order was being entrusted to an infidel indifferent to whether his compatriots worshipped one god, twenty gods, or no god at all. To Federalist clergy, if Americans elected a freethinker like Jefferson, they might as well throw their Bibles into bonfires and teach their children to chant mockeries of God.