The Republican presidential campaign is breathing new life into the Founding Fathers.

In recent months, Republican candidates have invoked these original American statesmen to provide powerful political precedents on issues as diverse as the “Me Generation,” inequality, the legalization of marijuana, the policies of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, foreign military intervention, same-sex marriage and religion in public life.

And although in real life they often bitterly disagreed with one another, the newly imagined Founding Fathers have reached a surprising degree of harmony in the minds of the GOP presidential candidates on these contemporary matters – many of which were unimaginable in an era of horse-drawn carriages, kerosene lamps and powdered wigs.

Just listen to Newt Gingrich.

“I think (Thomas) Jefferson or George Washington would have rather strongly discouraged you from growing marijuana, and their techniques of dealing with it would have been rather more violent than the current government,” he said last month at a campaign stop.

Or Ron Paul.

“I happen to believe the founders were libertarians. They didn’t want to regulate the market nor did they want to regulate personal lifestyles. And they had a nonintervention foreign policy.”

And here’s what Mitt Romney had to say about Democrats in his biography, “No Apology.”

They “fundamentally reject the choice made by the Founders” by supporting “an ascendant role” for government. “They simply do not believe in America as it was shaped by the Founders,” he wrote.

A historian says the GOP candidates’ portrait of the past misrepresents it.

“You can’t ask what the framers would do without giving them the same information we have,” said Stanford University history professor Jack Rakove. “You can’t pluck them out of the past and put them down in the present. They were deeply empirical in their political thinking.”

Massachusetts Institute of Technology history professor Pauline Maier said: “It is interesting why so many politicians and even judges today want to show that their ideas had firm foundations among the founders. In some ways, I suppose that defines a new phase in the culture wars over ‘who is most American.’ ”