Americans Remember That Church & State Are Separate

Navigating through this incoherent posting, needed corrections abound.  Depicting Thomas Jefferson as someone who wanted religion out of the public sphere has no basis in fact--his belief that specific denominations should not be established as having sole power was his concern, while at the same time, he was quick to print state funded copies of the Bible, quote from the Bible, etc.

The poll that reports Churches should stay out of politics has little to do with the statement that religious people need to be relegated to the private realm--a statement that would be far less agreement.  All would agree that the power and influence of conservative evangelicals today is very big--even as the brick and mortar neighborhood church is declining.  And is a decline good or bad for the Jews--it is easily arguable such a trend is bad for the Jews who practice Judaism.  Further, the implication that God believing people should be separate from the political realm assumes one's deepest held values have no relevance about the critical choices our country now faces--and this simply does not follow.  It assumes that if one has a belief in Christianity or Judaism or Islam--one has a bias which must be kept separate from the public political realm.  Secular people, it is assumed, lack any such bias.

 This is a joke.

i believe the 'evangelical' movement is on the decline. Orthodox Catholicism is actually making a resurgence, as well as Lutheranism, due in part i believe to a growing awareness of the corrosive societal effects of Zionism.

A lot of Americans are pissed off about being lied to by our news media, and  folks are waking up to who is lying, and why....and thats just the tip of te iceberg...

The story of Jefferson ordering Bibles is a myth; in fact, when I was at Monticello, they showed us the Bible Jefferson made himself by cutting out all of the magic stuff.

Also, Dave, I don't think you're in any position to judge what secular people do or don't lack.

Thus, some anonymous blogger comes on line to attack me where I have suggested that all people, even the sainted secularists, have biases, and in America--all people are allowed to speak and be heard.  I am in no position to judge that secular people might have a bias--I am told, right after I take my time to post a response to an entry that says a separation of church and state means religion needs to stay out of politics for the good of politics and the good of religion.  I post my entry, btw, right next to an ad that features a woman's bare rear end and 69,453 clicks over it.

So the challenge is laid down--go ahead and explain how it can be that religious people need to stay away and public speech needs to be the domain only of the sainted secular?  What is wrong with saying all people have their biases?

The lies about Thomas Jefferson are horrible.  It is galling that people believe he had a sensational sexual relationship with Sally Hemmings when DNA evidence proves that he did not. 

I think Jefferson's black relatives might disagree with you. And my point was that you have no right to pass judgement on things you know nothing about.

This is just too easy. I respond to a blog entry that asserts that some "separation of church and state" principle somehow invalidates the public political participation of religious people in this nation since a shul, a mega-church or a mosque is biased. But, we are told, somehow, without explanation, secular people and institutions lack bias.

To say this is dumb on its face.

When I respond that all people have their biases--I am somehow shouted down. This is how the left works--it is called Stalinism.

Regarding the ignorance concerning Jefferson--the media has been complicit. PBS ran a huge documentary, before the facts were conclusively known (although almost no historian ever really suspected a sexual affair between Jefferson and Sally Hemmings) featuring a dignified man named Woodson who insisted in dogmatic terms that he "is a Jefferson." His booming voice intoned how his father told him and that is that. When the news of a genetic marker that identified the Jefferson family line could be now accessed--he quickly submitted himself to the test--nope, he is not a Jefferson. In frustration, he dug up the the body of his father to prove his belief--nope, his father is not a Jefferson. And then, he even dug up his grandfather's grave only to find that his grandfather is also, conclusively, not a Jefferson. His response: he still goes to every meeting of the Jefferson family. I know he wants to be a Jefferson--he is not.

You wrote: 

The poll that reports Churches should stay out of politics has little to do with the statement that religious people need to be relegated to the private realm--a statement that would be far less agreement.

The post doesn't argue that religious people need to be relegated to the private realm. It only argues that churches need to stay out of politics, thus the mention to:

- rick warren's saddleback church

- bush faith based initiatives

- evangelicals bringing churches into our foreign policy equation

The one place where I say something close to what you bemoan is this:

over the last decade the general view has been to let religious people bring religion into the public sphere.

However, its apparent that within the context the discussion is about Churches.

That is why I cited to the Pew Forum study. 

I think you sort of ran off with a new thread; which is fine, but your views aren't antithetical to the post.

Also, if you note the part about Jefferson I don't say that Jefferson was a secularist - I don't think the category existed back then - but that he wanted to protect religion from the pernicious influences of politics. And that is why I then cited to the example of Iran (a case where worship has been utterly destroyed by politics). 

David is so wrong about Jefferson's relationship with Hemmings that it forces one to question his grasp on reality - if one hasn't already done so.

The trouble with your response is that you are still speaking about restricting the first amendment and there is a fundamental disagreement about what separation of church and state means.

You clearly spoke about religion in the public square and this means religious persons, not simply churches.  If you want to argue that your point was very narrow in its focus and you do not mean to restrict the 1st amendment rights of religious persons, this is fine but you would have to write another entry.  When you write an entry about restricting evangelicals and their role in the public life of the nation--you are speaking about people and not churches.

On the one hand, your distinction is meaningful under the law since Churches must follow specific guidelines, while private citizens do not.  On the other, your statement brings both citizen and church under one one argument and the Pew article blended the topic as well.  In truth, one must be specific:  some people are separationist purists and their goal is to restrict the expression of religion PERIOD.  I assumed this is your camp.  Others want narrow restrictions on religious institutions.  Still others are unwilling to allow an abridgment of the first amendment--this would be my take on the topic.

Therefore to clarify--are you a purist like the majority of the Left or are you simply willing to lobby for narrow restrictions, Ali? 

...and setting up strawmen to knock down.

I just invested 5 seconds of my time to hit Ctrl-F and search for the term First Amendment anywhere in this blog.  Lo and behold: the first time it shows up is in your comment.   Ali isn't making any type of legal argument at all.  He's just citing a few polls to demonstrate where popular opinion is going.

 Also, your aside about "some people" seeking to "restrict the expression of religion PERIOD" would be laughable were it not the modus operandi of most conservative thinkers: set up a strawman, call it liberal, and then point out how nuts it is. 

Yes, I'm sure you can find some nut looking to do the full Robesspierre and impose huge restrictions on religion.  But that's not how liberals generally view religion--they just don't want to see some people's religious views imposed on everyone.

--Z

I am not sure what camp I fall into. I have no problem with anyone expressing their religion in the public sphere. If the Evangelical authors want to publish a ton of books and make gazillions of bucks in sales I may think, "well, that's pretty annoying b/c those books are full of myths and apocalyptic theory" but I am not going to restrict them.

However, if simultaneous to that, evangelicals are becoming a potent political force - like if their biggest pastor holds what amounts to be a presidential debate in a church or if there is an evangelical president in the white house (bush II) - I am going to say, "well, hold on a second, there's definitely a connection between the immense sales of those books and these powerplay in the political sphere." 

And if I, or Pew, want to make that connection, that's not a first amendment issue whatsoever. Its just empirical observation. 

This observation (for lack of a better word) becomes an even more important inquiry when you're in America and are dealing with evangelicals and catholics. Those are huge religious constituencies (who admittedly aren't monolithic). I'd have far less trouble with a similar link for Jews or Hindus because well, they are very small in America, and they just don't have the same sort of political power. A jew could sell 100,000,000 million copies of a book in the states and still would be unable to do a Saddleback type of forum where he could then ask the question to two Christian candidates, "So, what are your views on Moses?" - and last I checked we haven't even come close to a Jewish president and Jews have been in this country as long as any minority I can think of.

I'm so sick of Zionism and the lying Western Media that I've decided to look into becoming an Orthodox Christian. Not being a religious person my entire life, this is really an amazing thing for me to consider. After studying the lying and hypocrisy of the Jews, I guess it all just really reached a tipping point for me. I want to thank Professor Israel Shahak for really waking me up to how much the Jews hate non-Jews. It really is sickening. Every societal ill can be traced to the Jew.

I cannot put words in your mouth, Ali but it is surely a problem that you have not thought about the first amendment but see fit to write about it.

The separation of church and state has nothing whatsoever about the first amendment and is contrary to the will of our Founders.  It is a calling that comes from a 1962 court case that merely referenced God, a simple supplication that allegedly  was thought to be against the establishment clause of the 1st amendment.  Ignorance of the Constitution in favor of modern political sensibilities has brought America to a state of affairs that effectively squashes simple religious speech by any American in the public square.  ZBird is simply not paying attention.  If any teacher in a public school simply ended a class with the same ending enunciated just a few moments ago by Barack Obama--the ACLU would sweep in and punish the teacher, demanding his immediate removal.  Indeed, this has been done dozens of time so literally any bit of religious expression is a dicey proposition--all that is lacking is the gall of the courts.

The first amendment says in part that the Federal government should be silent regarding an establishment of religion in the states--and when the amendment was passed, many of the colonies had established churches they did not wish to dis-establish--hence the needed wording given in the amendment.  Only with a really tortured bit of reasoning can a nation previously rich in religious speech come to ban such free expression, in direct contradiction to our rights as Americans.  Today, we live under the tyranical control of courts that can potentially punish any American who comes forward to utter a religious sentiment if that person is a teacher in a school, or even an employer in his own private company or in a variety of situations--some not yet identified as supposedly dangerous.  When Obama invokes the blessings of the Almighty, asking God to bless America--in the sick reasoning of our courts--THAT constitutes an establishment of religion.  

A simple creche in a mall is now the subject of a vicious law suit, a children's song called "Friends" that is as harmless as it could be was banned from the mouths of children so we were told they could not sing even if the song was a song and not a prayer and even if it failed to mention or identify the Christian deity-- but it cannot be sung even if it only implies a Creator.  Books now litter the landscape bemoaning the fact that we now live under the dictatarship of courts ignoring their responsibility to uphold the Constitution.  Instead--the have re-written it to overturn the 1st amendment. 

This is not in the interests of religious minorities or religious minorities.  The alleged sensitivities of the non-religious have been upheld as the only speech worth protecting in principle.  Religious speech is to be regulated and now carefully and harshly regulated so that the 1st amendment no longer stands. That is the "empirical observation"--so I ask again, Ali--is this good to so heavily regulate religious expression?

I think there is a tension between the world of the founders and 21st century multi-religious society. Do you determine which religion (or denomination) gets to lead the prayer or have their religious symbols in public places by mere virtue of longevity of presence in America? What would happen to Muslims, Hindus and Mormons then?

David,

You've truly done a wonderful job responding to lots of things neither I nor Ali ever never said in our comments.

In any event, I'm actually not as extreme a secularist as you might think, and disagree with some of the ACLU et al.'s more extreme attempts to keep religion out of the public square, such as your creche example. 

That being said, I doubt you can produce a single example (with citation) of a private employer being legally prevented from uttering a religious sentiment.  

You are correct about public school teachers, though I happen to agree that public school students should not be subjected to other people's religions against theirs and their parents' will. 

You might be surprised to learn that I whole-heartedly support school vouchers to allow families to choose where to send their kids to school.  And if parents choose to use those vouchers for religious education, I have no qualm with that. 

But as long as the state forces its citizens to place their kids in the hands of the state for 6 hours a day, I think it is perfectly acceptable to demand to that the teachers (being agents of the state) avoid indoctrinating their students with religion.

--Z

The prayer that created this invention of a separation of church and state was precisely the same kind of generic non-denominational invocation to the Almighty that makes the purists absolutely bonkers.  This has a bad effect on our entire educational system.  Ali, religious freedom means it can be allowed, not mandated.  In today's America, the fear that some evangelical might try to run his class like a seminary is very remote since almost all teachers are secular. In REALITY, atheism has run amock at every turn and no one seems to care that parents have been forced to leave the public schools en masse. The fear that someone might hear "God" is irrational.  The reality that schools offend so many good people that they are forced to either send them to private school or home school them goes without a passing notice. Children and parents are subjected to a whole range of things against their will, ZBird--what do you say about that?  Not a single hard-core Christian or Jew wants to browbeat anyone with religion.  The call has always been a simple reference to where are blessings originate and that call has been crushed by the strong hand of the courts, against the will of the people.

As the people who have brought the idea of one God to the world, it is some irony that it is Jews who want to make sure God cannot be mentioned in the public square, don't you think?

You are correct that the constitution does not speak about "separation" of church and state, but it does say that no religion may be established.  When an agent of the state (a public school teacher) uses class time to inculcate religious beliefs in the students assigned to him, that's establishment of religion.  Yes, children and parents are subjected to a whole range of things against their will--but shouldn't be subjected to things that the constitution says they have a right not to be subjected to. 

" Not a single hard-core Christian or Jew wants to browbeat anyone with religion," you say.  you really mean that?  it's absurd.  

--Z

David, you write (and I realize this is not the thrust of your argument which now is between you and zbird):

As the people who have brought the idea of one God to the world, it is some irony that it is Jews who want to make sure God cannot be mentioned in the public square, don't you think?

No. Not ironic at all. David, the Jews lead the country in making sure that public officials do not become agent of a religion, because for nearly 90% of this country's history, it has been Jews who've had to endure being imposed upon by Christians.

You will find that the Jews have been moral leaders in a number of 20th century 'secular' initiatives. There are clearly reasons for that; reasons having had to do with a long legacy of imposition by Christians.

[It is the same reason that in today's Muslim world the 'secular' response usually comes from non-Muslim religions or minority Muslim groups].

"As the people who have brought the idea of one God to the world, it is
some irony that it is Jews who want to make sure God cannot be
mentioned in the public square, don't you think?"

 Once again--try and have a little focus, David.  Argue against the positions I actually take, not against some phantom generic "liberal" who believes all these hateful things about religion.  I have no problem with mentioning God in the public square--that's free speech.  My problem is when the state itself is imposing religion on the public.  

--Z

Did I read right? Is somebody claiming that there is no DNA evidence that Thomas Jefferson fathered any of Sally Hemings's children? Because that is false.

 "Not a single hard-core Christian or Jew wants to browbeat anyone with religion"--hilarious. I guess if you look at it a certain way...it's not that they want to browbeat anyone, it's just that they want everyone to see the light and stop having premarital sex and abortions and being homosexual and playing that infernal devil music.

No hard core religious people feel any need to browbeat others? Not the AFA, FOF, the Dominionists, the staff at the Air Force Academy, the Army Chaplains who are now (for the first time ever) told to evangalize unaffiliated troops? Not the nasty old goat-shaggers in Israel who completely hijacked marriage and conversion and thereby ripped apart hundreds of Jewish families? Not the Moral Majority?

All I can say is...