I laid in bed last night, awake, thinking of this.
Thinking of how Governor Walker was taken to task for saying he wasn't sure if the President was a Christian.
So the story as we assume we know it now is this: In 2004 Obama decided it would be politically advantageous to say he opposed gay marriage when in his heart, he supported it.
So is it really that far fetched to think that at some point in his early Chicago days, he decided that he couldn't get elected to anything as an out of the closet Atheist/Agnostic, so he pretended to be a follower of the Christian faith?
I doubt they were the only ones.
as for Jefferson, Enlightenment fueled deism was popular in the secular (non-clergy) literate English world at the time. nearly all of the "Founding Fathers" fit that demographic.
American religion moved to the right with the Second Great Awakening (1820s through 50s), became embedded in larger cultural issues in the teens and 20s (think Scopes trial), and only became explicitly politically active sometime in the 1970s (though before that it was heavily embedded within the segregationist Citizens' Councils, John Birch style anticommunism, etc).
Religion has been active in American politics from the beginning. What is most distinct about the Religious Right arising out of the 1970s is that it defined itself more clearly as a religious coalition of conservatives in different denominations opposed to secularism, whereas earlier religious political movements tended to either be more sectarian, or more compatible with secularly oriented politics (and occasionally both).
