text: "When today’s Christian nationalists look back at the past two centuries of history, they see secular ideologies at the root of conflict and war. For Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, however, religion lay as the root cause of bloodshed and tyranny. [Jefferson and Madison] stood, in profound ways, closer to Martin Luther, and Galileo, than we do to them."
  
  Conservative "originalists" trying to divine the thoughts of our Founders are always on thin ice, which is getting thinner with every passing decade.  But they also are guilty of actually grossly misunderstanding that originalist thought — or rejecting it outright — when it doesn't square with their very modern Christian nationalist ideology.