"Liberties are the gift of God"

Matthew Franck responds to a column in which Jefferson is quoted criticizing the McCain/Obama appearance at Saddleback :

Kathleen Parker .... tells us that McCain's and Obama's appearances, and Warren's more pointedly religious questions, were "supremely wrong," even "un-American." This is because America is a "nation founded on the separation of church and state." And for authority...turns to Thomas Jefferson, who wrote in his Notes on the State of Virginia that "it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."

This was Jefferson at his most epigrammatic—which is just when he was likely to say something half-baked. For while it is quite true that having a polytheist or an atheist in the neighborhood does me no material harm, it is also true that if all the neighbors believe in twenty gods, or if all the neighbors believe in no god at all, I am living in a very different country, and not in the United States. No, not even Jefferson's United States, for just a few pages after these lines, Jefferson wrote, "can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not be violated but with his wrath?"

Bench Memos on National Review Online