Bill, that was a wonderful post on a very troubling issue. The secularist movement in this nation has succeeded in promulgating the idea that any religious expression is a potential violation of someone’s rights. This may indeed be a grander victory than usurping Jefferson’s phrase of “wall of separation between church and state” from his 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association. In that letter Jefferson, as president, explained to the concerned Baptists how in the Constitution’s eyes the government could support religious expression without harming others’ rights. Somehow everyone now states “separation of church and state” to mean the government must quash all religious sentiment in public areas.

This bastardization is then used to explain the Founders’ “intent” behind the First Amendment‘s protection of religious freedom, since the archaic phraseology “the free expression thereof” sounds so foreign to our modern ears.

The ne plus ultra of that is the case out west where a public school is telling a civics instructor he can’t teach the Declaration of Independence because it references a Creator ? i.e., the nation’s founding document is unconstitutional!

Religious pluralism was one of the founding principles not only of the nation, but of the colonies before it. (“Pluralism” was the forerunner of “diversity,” but as pluralism denoted tolerance as opposed to favoritism, it has been dropped from circulation among the intolerant diversityniks.) But by bastardizing Jefferson’s phrase and then using it to subvert our nation’s constitutional protection of religious pluralism, the secularists have produced people who believe the Constitution essentially states no religious expression is allowed ? rather than guarantees all religious expression is welcome.

It’s a significant change. Forbidding all religious expression tends to tyranny, whereas protecting all religious expression (even on “government property”) tends to liberty.

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As Tanya Khodkevich wrote:

You can pray freely
But just so God alone can hear.

(She received a ten-year sentence for these verses.) A person convinced that he possessed spiritual truth was required to conceal it from his own children! In the twenties the religious education of children was classified a political crime under Article 58-10 of the Code ? in other words, counterrevolutionary propaganda!

…

We have already had an opportunity to observe that the separation of church and state was so construed by the state that … the only church remaining was that church which, in accordance with the Scriptures, lay within the heart.

? Aleksander I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago