The American Founding
Reason=Revelation in Political Thought

One of the most radical of the theories surrounding religion and the founding of the republic is as follows. Puritan thought adapted to reason…became reason instead of revelation based. Since the founders “expected” the country to be religious, there was no attempt to make revelation a part of the foundation of the new nation. There was no mixing of political and religious thought. They had become one.
The reason for this is the failure of Puritan’s to establish a “city on a hill” by revelation alone. A theocracy, as understood at that time, was impossible. Reason was necessary to have political order. And, eventually religion became comfortable with reason to the point where reason and revelation merged in religion. Furthermore, at the time of the founding, Christianity was increasingly seen as reasonable and based on natural law discovered by reason alone.
Going beyond that position was the twist that this process is really the sacrilization of the profane…what had been seen as lowly and worldly was now part of religious thought. This was an expansion of the original Puritan concept of the sacred. Their limited view was widened to bring in politics. A devotee to this position is Thomas West. West believes that:

…the political theology of the American Revolution was grounded on both revelation and reason. No ‘blending or amalgm of Protestant theology with secular rationalism was needed, because scripture was understood to teach the same political principles as philosophy.

Revelation includes reason. Holy Scripture is understood to stand for the same principles as the political thought of the day. They were as one. So, West would posit that John Locke was a Protestant theologian because he represents political views not at variance with what Scripture teaches about political thought.
There is much to question about this approach. Since Locke does not proceed from Scripture or on a basis of the Calvinism of the times, the claim that he spoke Christian orthodoxy in his political views is dubious at best. The view that there was no mixing of revelation and reason in the founding is problematic, at best. To further propound that reason and revelation actually stood for the same thing in the political thinking of the time is an even further stretch. Finally, the idea that this process actually turned the profane into the sacred is a view shared only by the “Christian America” crowd.