We’re a Christian nation! The Civil War wasn’t about slavery! Fighting Hitler was a mistake! The lies run deep
It is hardly surprising that ideologues are tempted to hijack history to vindicate their worldview; the interpretive nature of the field makes it vulnerable to misappropriation in a way that math or physics, generally speaking, are not. As we have seen in Florida, Texas and other laboratories of autocracy, once Republicans obtain unified control of government, they are compulsively driven to monkey with the history curricula of the public schools.
Overwhelmingly, conservatives still reject a balanced, critical view of the founders or the debates leading to the establishment of the Constitution, in favor of full-on adulation. The only exception is the lunatic fringe, such as the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Alabama, which believes the Constitution was a capitulation to central planning and the extinction of state sovereignty by the federal Moloch. But then, the anarcho-capitalists at the institute also believe in the right to drive drunk (no, really!).
The vast majority of conservatives, with their alleged constitutional originalism, claim to venerate the founders. But there’s a problem: The signers of the Declaration of Independence and framers of the Constitution were, if not exactly creatures of the Enlightenment like Voltaire or Hume, then heavily influenced by its political and social theories. While the great majority were formal members of some Protestant denomination or other, many were, at most, Deist by inner conviction. Tom Paine opposed organized religion altogether.
Given that the modern-day American conservative movement is largely a political campaign against the Enlightenment and its fruits, the founders’ beliefs present a problem. Conservatives solve it by systematic distortion of the historical record, even as they hand-wave away the establishment clause of the First Amendment.