Tom Tancredo, the former  congressman from Colorado who briefly ran for
the 2008 Republican presidential nomination on an anti-immigrant
platform, has now thrown his hat into the Colorado senatorial gubernatorial ring, running
under the auspices of the Constitution Party. That party, among
other things, indulges in what has become all-to-familiar historical revisionism regarding the
religious roots of the republic, to wit (from the preamble to its platform):

This great nation was founded, not by religionists,
but by
Christians; not on religions but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For this
very reason peoples of other faiths have been and are afforded asylum,
prosperity, and freedom of worship here.

The goal of the Constitution Party is to restore American
jurisprudence to its Biblical foundations and to limit the federal
government to its Constitutional boundaries.

Some of those founders were hardly Christians. Thomas Jefferson, for his part, was denounced by Federalist pamphleteers in the 1796 and 1800 presidential elections as a Francophiliac atheist. But never mind that. The key claim here is that the United States was founded on the Gospel, and that this is the reason those of other faiths were afforded religious liberty.

Let us stipulate that certain kinds of Protestant Christianity may have disposed some revolutionary-era Americans toward the principle of permitting all religious comers to worship according to their lights. That was not the kind that impelled the Calvinist powers-that-be in the Massachusetts Bay Colony to throw the likes of Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson out of Boston. Or to kill the odd Quaker who had the misfortune of stumbling into their neck of the woods. But by the end of the 18th century, freedom of conscience was a widely accepted idea in the Anglo-American world.

For the framers of the Constitution, however, this was a non-Christian Enlightenment point of view. George
Washington’s 1790 letter
to the Jews of Newport could not be clearer that it was a secular principle of citizenship, not a Gospel gift of soul freedom that had been embraced in the Novus Ordo Seclorum: 

The citizens of
the United States of America have a right to applaud
themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and
liberal policy, a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty
of conscience and immunities of citizenship.

It is now no more that toleration is
spoken of as if it were the
indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of
their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the
United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no
assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should
demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their
effectual support.

The patronizing religiosity of the Constitution Party bears no relationship to the Constitution.