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gwern comments on The noncentral fallacy - the worst argument in the world? - Less Wrong
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Jefferson, kind of?
Pfft. He'd be the first to say he was a deist.
Right, but deism then had roughly the same social / religious status as modern atheism does. He was certainly attacked as an infidel during the elections, and as the story goes, the pious buried their Bibles at news of his election, for fear that the new administration would take them away.
Given how many Founding Father types were deists, I suspect that they didn't have 'roughly' the same status. Were there contemporary presidents saying of deists that "I don't know that atheists should be regarded as citizens, nor should they be" (to quote Bush)?
Three points:
I think that the number and public perception of atheists have both significantly improved since the H.W. Bush years.
I think someone running for president today who listed their religious affiliation as "deist" or said things like "I think Jesus's morality is a good one, but he wasn't divine and miracles don't happen" would be considered basically an atheist by the people who would react negatively because of that.
I think the modern analogues of the Founding Fathers as a group are not presidents but public intellectuals, and atheists are very overrepresented among public intellectuals (perhaps even the majority). That public intellectuals then were mostly areligious shouldn't be that odd when comparing with now.
I wasn't really around for Bush, but I haven't noticed any improvement. What makes you think that?
Romney did fine, despite believe pretty darn weird things by Christian standards.
I'll believe that as soon as the next 4 presidents or so are public intellectuals, and a bunch of public intellectuals draft a new Constitution and get the states to approve it etc.
Stuff like this, though I'm having trouble getting access to the historical poll data.
My model was that the sort of person who would become a memorable Founding Father in the 1700s is the sort of person who would become a public intellectual in the 2000s, and that atheism is more strongly linked by personal temperament than public position. I think the early American presidents were very different from the ones we have now, and so it's not clear which comparisons carve reality at the joints.
(It's not clear to me what point you would concede if an atheist president was identified.)