Drawing the line between church and state

[☆ TexasFreethinker ☆]

Here's an interesting and fairly balanced article on the current conflicts over the separation of church and state in America. From USNews.com.

 

Divided, We Stand

America's long struggle to balance church and state isn't getting any easier

By Jay Tolson

 

Name any number of the hot-button issues of our time--abortion, gay marriage, stem-cell research--and the question of religion's place in American politics and public life looms large. Indeed, no line in public life is more hotly disputed or subject to more relentless negotiation than the one dividing church and state.

 

To many religious Americans--and America is the most religious of the advanced nations--faith has a legitimate role in shaping the laws of the nation. The First Amendment, they insist, was not written to exclude religion from the public sphere. But many of the Americans who claim to have no religion--and whose numbers, by one survey, doubled from 14 million to 29 million between 1990 and 2000--disagree. They hold that this public sphere should rightly be a secular space, not favoring or even representing the views of any religious orientation. Even many devout Americans feel that religion's entry into the public sphere violates the Founding Fathers' intent.

[trashy]

Here's an interesting and fairly balanced article on the current conflicts over the separation of church and state in America.  From USNews.com.

I agree, very nice article. I do, however, have a bone or two to pick with the author. He states "But Madison and the other founders never imagined they were banishing religion from the public sphere. In the words they spoke, the symbols they embraced, the rituals they established--from days of thanksgiving to prayers at the start of Congress--the founders made clear that acknowledgment of divine providence was not only acceptable but essential."

 

Madison disagrees. He specifically disapproved of paid chaplains: "The Constitution of the U. S. forbids everything like an establishment of a national religion. The law appointing Chaplains establishes a religious worship for the national representatives, to be performed by Ministers of religion, elected by a majority of them; and these are to be paid out of the national taxes. Does not this involve the principle of a national establishment, applicable to a provision for a religious worship for the Constituent as well as of the representative Body, approved by the majority, and conducted by Ministers of religion paid by the entire nation?" And regarding national days of prayer, he wrote "They seem to imply and certainly nourish the erroneous idea of a national religion," in a document referred to as the "Detached Memoranda."

 

Our 'founding fathers' were wary of Theocratic tendencies even 230 years ago.