being from the origins with the Knights Templar, who were originated by the Pope ... and disbanded by the Pope (Clement V and King Philip IV of France, who wanted their monies and lands).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_TemplarOddly, they evolved into the Freemasons organization, although many would deny this. Their feud from the 1300s to around 1948 with the Knights Hospitallers, now known as Knights of Malta deserves a look on its own merits.
Templars/Freemasons became fiercely anti-Papists. They feuded with the Knights Hospitallers
"Robinson pointed out that this over-riding desire to destroy the Hospitallers makes little sense - except when seen in the light of that Order's profiting by the Templars' fall from grace 70 years before." from
http://www.maknap.com/MysteryTV/history/templars/articles/mhte_17b_survival.htmWhen the Protestant movement began, they joined. See also The Catholic Origins of Futurism and Preterism
www.aloha.net/~mikesch/antichrist.htm
which shows the origins of Bush and the novelists of Left Behind 'dispensationalism' is actually the 'futurism' of the Jesuits, and the counter-reformation's defenders of Catholicism.
Nowadays, since the post WWII era with the creation of the state of Israel and the potential for a Third Temple, you have a CIA (newly created with mostly Knight of Malta in the leadership cadre - Donovan, Casey, Dulles, Colby, Angleton, the list goes on) that may have wanted a Third Temple in Jerusalem...please read
Impact of Millenium on The Holy Land
www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/week319/cover.html
along with George Monbiot's
Their beliefs are bonkers, but they are at the heart of power
US Christian fundamentalists are driving Bush's Middle East policy
www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/week319/cover.html
which mistakes the origins of dispensationalism as in the mid 1800s, forgetting to go back to the Jesuits in the 1500s and Francisco Ribera,
and don't forget Chris Hedges Soldiers of Christ II Feeling the Hate
www.harpers.org/FeelingTheHate.html
Needless to say, modern evangelical Protestants have embraced the formerly Catholic 'futurist' end times eschatology (study of the end times). This preoccupation with the Temple in Jerusalem, to the exclusion of the rest of the Gospels, has left religion in the US in the hands of .... guys just like George Bush.
Go figure. And watch what they DO and not what they SAY.
The Founding Fathers Freemasonry kept their religion to a spiritual Great Architech of the Universe and secret signs and code-talk. Outward preference of one religion would be seen as 'bad form'. Please note that George Washington's letter to the synagogue in Rhode Island
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/US-Israel/bigotry.htmlis read annually there, and Washington himself a devout Christian was also considered the Grand Master of the Nation (my phrasing) in Masonic terminology.
The Founders kept it all 'generalized' and kept petty religious differences out of their brotherhood. America was lucky that way.