Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . .  The First Amendment

Church and state must remain separate.  The most dangerous combination the world has ever seen is uniting the absolute authority of religion with the absolute power of the state.  All attempts to combine the church and state have resulted in misery, oppression, and corruption of both the church and government.  History is replete with the wreckage of tyrannical governments and hypocritical churches that did not comprehend this.

Majority rule is the preferred method of governance for the state, but religion is a matter of the soul, an area governed solely by an individual’s conscience.   This is the primary reason that church and state are incompatible.

Our Founding Fathers’ recognized this incompatibility.  The Constitution was devised not only to protect the interests of the majority but also to protect minorities from the tyranny of the majority.

Non-Christians are a minority in our country.  Their right to religious liberty is protected.  They should not have Christianity thrust upon them by school prayer, vouchers, and established religion because the majority demands it.

Today Fundamentalists are pushing to return a to a time that only existed in their idealized version of the past. They espouse the myth that our founding fathers were devout Christians and intended that America be a Christian nation.

The truth is many of our founding fathers were not Christians. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin — all were Deists.

They did not believe in a personal God, but only in an impersonal force or Providence. They did not believe Jesus was the Son of God or anything other than a Jewish teacher. They did not believe that the Bible was sacred, the word of God, or anything other than literature.  Thomas Jefferson edited his own version of the Bible deleting references to the virgin birth of Jesus, his miracles, and his resurrection.

Jefferson was not alone in his views.  The convention that drafted the Constitution would not allow a prayer to open the proceedings.  There is no reference to God or Jesus in the Constitution.  In fact, many Christians of the time were enraged by the omission of God from the Constitution, — yet many today persist in glorifying the abundant Christian faith of our nation’s forefathers.

The desire for a Christian nation is the driving force in every issue for which the Religious Right fights.  The push for vouchers stem from their displeasure at public schools’ for having the gall to teach sciences other than creationism, for having the gall to try to teach sex education (other than a strictly abstinence-based curriculum), and for having the gall not to require students to publicly pray during the school day.

Education is key to the plans of groups within the Religious Right, as well as the Southern Baptist Convention.  In their view, if enough young Americans grow up learning that America is a "Christian nation", it will become a reality.

Such a reality would be as dangerous to Christians as it is to non-Christians.   A Christian nation makes second class citizens out of non-Christians.  After all, in a Christian nation how can you be a good citizen if you are not Christian?

However, what is often overlooked is the danger it presents to Christians as well.  No nation has ever existed that was solely a Christian nation.  A particular sect of Christianity always becomes established.  Those outside of the sect face persecution.  A cursory look at the long, bloody history of established religion in England proves this point.

Freedom is never free.  On paper, the former Soviet Union gave more freedoms to their citizens than the ones we have in America.  But those freedoms were only paper freedoms.  For freedom to become a reality, citizens must breathe life into them by exercising their rights and remaining diligent against attempts to take those freedoms away.

Ultimately the religious right would like to destroy the Constitutional separation of church and state, and in so doing, our religious liberty.  To implement their plans, they hide behind soothing rhetoric and nice names like vouchers, parental rights, school choice, and solemnization.