At David McCullough’s recent appearance in Fort Worth, Texas, to discuss his new book, “1776,” a cheeky audience member asked the author how he thought George Washington would view what we’ve made of the country and whether he’d be a Republican or a Democrat.

After pretending to dodge such a loaded question, McCullough said: “All the Founders, if they came back, would be astounded and gratified that the system of government they started still stands.”

They’d be pleased that we remain guided by the Constitution, he surmised.

And he said, “They’d understand what we need to understand: America is a work in progress.”

It might help if the Framers could explain where they meant for us to progress when they settled on this language for the religion clauses of the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

Heaven knows that the Supreme Court justices who interpret the application of those words continue to be hopelessly conflicted.

The discord was evident in the outcomes of rulings on Ten Commandments displays at the Texas Capitol (constitutional religious acknowledgment, the court said) and at Kentucky courthouses (nope – unconstitutional religious promotion).

Is President Washington’s invocation of God in the first Thanksgiving Proclamation or President Jefferson’s refusal to issue such messages the better barometer of their views about the place of a single deity in our public affairs?

Is Jefferson’s skepticism about organized religion or his invitation to prayer in his second inaugural address more insightful?

Were the Founders largely concerned about preventing the government from favoring one Christian sect over another? Was their aim to protect monotheistic religions from competitors who don’t believe in a single God? Or did they try to leave us a framework for accommodating a population that is spiritually pluralistic beyond their 18th-century imagining?

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor recently concluded that a true reading of the First Amendment requires government neutrality toward religion – and she cited a James Madison statement about conscience.

When the court requires that government neither dictate how individuals worship nor interfere with their religious choices, “we do so for the same reason that guided the Framers – respect for religion’s special role in society,” she wrote, concurring in the Kentucky case.

“It is true that the Framers lived at a time when our national religious diversity was neither as robust nor as well recognized as it is now. They may not have foreseen the variety of religions for which this nation would eventually provide a home. They surely could not have predicted new religions, some of them born in this country.

“But they did know that line-drawing between religions is an enterprise that, once begun, has no logical stopping point. … The religion clauses, as a result, protect adherents of all religions, as well as those who believe in no religion at all.”

Dissenting in the Kentucky case, Justice Antonin Scalia implied that the majority was out of its mind to suggest that the Constitution requires neutrality. He referred to frequent religious references in early speeches and letters, chaplains in Congress and even the invocation “God save the United States and this honorable court.”

He called one of Justice John Paul Stevens’ arguments “a cloud of obfuscating smoke” and said that a Ten Commandments display falls “well within the mainstream” of the kinds of religious acknowledgments that pervaded the nation’s government from its beginning.

But Stevens, who dissented in the Texas case, said Scalia’s cramped reading of the First Amendment would allow a state to sponsor crucifixes and New Testament quotations in all manner of public spaces.

Instead, he found neutrality “firmly rooted in our nation’s history and our Constitution’s text.”

“I recognize that the requirement that government must remain neutral between religion and irreligion would have seemed foreign to some of the Framers; so too would a requirement of neutrality between Jews and Christians,” he wrote.

“Fortunately, we are not bound by the Framers’ expectations – we are bound by the legal principles they enshrined in our Constitution.”

Despite their disagreement, none of these justices would deny the Commandments’ role as a historical legal guidepost or their continuing importance to many of us as fundamental rules for living.

And, I believe, they would agree that religious acknowledgment can be appropriate and that there are times for Americans to weep and pray together as a nation.

But it doesn’t take justices or Founders or the Constitution to recognize that the number of Ten Commandments exhibits around the country won’t determine their influence.

The real monument to religious faith is how the beliefs we’ve embraced in our hearts drive our actions – to help others, to ease suffering, to promote good in the world.