Some additional thoughts on the seperation of church and state...

Yesterday I talked about the two articles I saw in the paper regarding the issue of the separations of church and state. This seems to be a very hot topic of late. Frankly, it’s an ideal that I don’t think will ever be possible, unless government is made up completely of atheists and agnostics. For some reason it will always be allowable for atheists and agnostics to spread their faith in public settings. Of course, I believe that a government made up completely of atheists and agnostics would be far worse than the occasional mingling of church and state we see today.

I have a couple reasons for saying this. First, separation of church and state was never intended to remove religion from the public square. It was intended to allow people the opportunity to practice their religion without the state telling them how to do it. When people fled religious persecution in Europe and came to America, they started the same kind of religious institutions that they fled, only with their own religions calling the shots. The Baptists and Quakers fought for the freedom to worship as they felt God calling them. That’s the history of our current church-state separation issue. Congress can have no right to pass any laws forbidding the freedom of religion. Somehow we have turned that around to imply that any public religious expression is an evil thing. That’s so far from the original intention that only an incredibly liberal court system can ever make sense of it. I sure can’t.

My other reason for saying this is that I don’t think it’s possible. If you are a person of faith, how can you put that faith on hold every time you enter the public square, and still be a person of faith? How can faith be incredibly important to you, yet live a life devoid of faith in public? I don’t think an authentic faith can be put on hold like that. If you truly believe, you believe in public and at home. If I don’t see a faith that makes a difference in the public square, I’ll bet that faith doesn’t make a difference at home, either. Real faith can’t be turned off, it’s who we are, it’s either there or it’s not.

Living a life of faith means just that. Living a life of faith. And if nobody else can see it, you’re not living it.