Ben Franklin and Sen. Bob Casey would have disagreed on a lot of things concerning religion. Franklin was something of a skeptic where Casey is a choir boy – Holy Cross College, the Jesuit Volunteer Corps and then a law degree from Catholic University.

But they would have had the same opinion about what recently took place in the U.S. Senate.

The Senate opens every one of its sessions with a prayer. On July 12, for the first time in U.S. history, a Hindu priest offered the prayer. Sen. Casey introduced him. And when a group of Casey’s Christian co-religionists tried shouting him down, Casey had them removed from the Senate chambers.

Franklin would have applauded Casey.

He was involved in the building of a church in Philadelphia that gave the evangelist George Whitefield a pulpit when he was so ridiculed by the religious establishment he was preaching in the fields. It wasn’t Whitefield’s fire and brimstone rhetoric – he was fond of referring to his congregants as half-devil and half-beast – that encouraged Franklin to lay out the welcome mat for him. Franklin insisted that same pulpit would welcome a representative from the Muslim world preaching Islam.

So even though Franklin and Casey might have disagreed about religion, they would have seen eye-to-eye on the spirit of American pluralism.