A Revolutionary Time.

What is below is well stated for a Christian publication. Perhaps the fundamentalists can explain this from Christianity in America, a Handbook, 1983 William B. Eardmans Publishing company.

To quote page 164: (in regards to the Revolutionary War)

If the war seemed particularly unfriendly to the church, it also accelerated Enlightenment values, natural theology, and secularized thought. Revolutionary heroes like Ethan Allen (Reason the Only Oracle of Man, 1784) and Thomas Paine (Age of Reason, 1794-1796) launched savage attacks upon orthodox Christianity and advocated Deism, a system of thought that dispensed with revelation, ridiculed the Incarnation-a Creator meddling with the laws of the universe-and exalted human reason and ethical endeavors. The first three elected Presidents of the United States-Washington, Adams, and Jefferson-all advocated a form of reasonable religion that drained the supernatural from religion and valued piety primarily for its civic utility.

Although this form of enlightened religion never came to command the allegiance of most common people, it did enjoy great popularity among educated Americans and was quite the intellectual rage among college students in the last two decades of the eighteenth century. At Princeton in 1782 only two students professed Christianity, and Bishop Meade wrote that the College of William and Mary had become a hotbed of French skepticism. In assessing what it meant that only five Yale students belonged to the college church in New Haven in 1800, Lyman Beecher lamented: "That was the day of the infidelity of the Tom Paine school. Boys that dressed flax in the barn, as I used to, read him and believed him."