America and God: A History Lesson (Part II)
After writing yesterday's entry, I ran across a letter in my local paper from a couple weeks ago by another America-by-the-Bible type. He claimed that the doctrine of the separation of church and state was fabricated from a speech given by Jefferson in which he warned against the state running the church, but not vice-versa. He accuses people like me for not doing out homework, and says that the writings of the Founders show they founded this nation as a Christian nation, under Christian principles.
He is cherry-picking the facts, of course. While I'm not familiar with the referenced speech, I have no reason to doubt that it is authentic. But you must take this kind of thing in context with the rest of the man's writings. It's like conservatives who claim Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy based solely on the highlight reel of the "I have a dream" speech. Jefferson saw Jesus, as far as I can tell, as the ultimate philosopher and moral sage. (See the links I provided in yesterday's entry.) He seems unlikely to fall into the "HaveyouacceptedJesusChristasyourpersonallordandsavior?" category. In fact in his later days, he declared that Unitarianism seemed him to be the most American of denominations, and predicted that it would become the predominant religion in our country.
History is really, really important, both for understanding why things have happened, and for figuring out what to do in the future. The Framers lived in a time that wasn't all that far removed from horribly bloody and drawn-out conflicts based on religion. In England, there were the struggles between the Catholics and Anglicans. Many of the early British colonists were fleeing this conflict. The Puritans of Plymouth, and the Quakers in Pennsylvania wanted nothing to do with either side in this conflict. Maryland was founded by the British Catholics escaping persecution. And the Framers surely knew of the unimaginable devastation wreaked in Germany the century before our own revolution by the Thirty-Years War. Calvinists, Lutherans and Catholics slaughtered each other in a conflict which is believed to have left the population of central Europe one third smaller by the time it was done.
They wanted to have no part of that in their new nation, and so they sought to build a wall between the passions of religious factionalism and the power of the state with its weapons of war. This does not mean that they tried to destroy religion, or spread Atheism. But they recognized the wisdom of keeping religious institutions and secular power in their own corners. Given the religious fault lines in our current world conflict, we must do our homework, and see why the worst thing we could do today would be to align our state with any religious dogma.
3:13:25 PM 
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