Americans have been arguing bitterly over religion since before the founding of the independent nation. The Colonists came by it honestly. They arrived from Europe with a legacy of several hundred years of wars with the infidels, the Papists and fellow Christian reformers.

A few early Colonists died for their religious beliefs, or for lack of them. Others were jailed or exiled.

Then Vice President Thomas Jefferson, a decade after the nation’s founding, became the first presidential candidate – but not the last – to be falsely characterized as a Muslim.

John Quincy Adams, advocating for the re-election of his father, “exposed” Jefferson as “a Turk,” that day’s euphemism for followers of Mohammad, which in 18th century American eyes made him more unfit than a Jew, or even a Roman Catholic, to head this Protestant nation.