Yet Another Christian Fake Quote

From recent e-mail from a fundamentalist:

"Cursed be all that learning that is contrary to the cross of Christ."
-James Madison, America's Providential History, p. 93.

Now, anyone who knows anything about Madison should be very suspicious of this quote. Madison was not a traditional Christian, and said things like "Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprize, every expanded prospect." (letter by Madison to William Bradford, April 1, 1774).

Second, as Chris Rodda has shown, America's Providential History is thoroughly unreliable when it comes to quotations.

Third, this quotation is attributed in Popular Science, February 1887, to John Witherspoon, the president of Princeton University, not Madison. I haven't found it in Witherspoon's writings, but it sounds much more like Witherspoon than Madison. Confusingly, it has also been attributed to Jonathan Dickinson, another of Princeton's presidents. It sounds consistent with him, too.

So I am calling bogus on this quote. Not surprisingly, it is found on many Christian websites, with attributions to Madison. We see here a good example of the fundamentalist devotion to truth.