“I consider the government of the United States as interdicted by the Constitution from intermeddling with religious institutions, their doctrines, discipline, or exercises. This results not only from the provision that no law shall be made respecting the establishment or free exercise of religion, but from that also which reserves to the States the powers not delegated to the United States. Certainly, no power to prescribe any religious exercise or to assume authority in any religious discipline has been delegated to the General Government. It must then rest with the States.”
–Thomas Jefferson, letter to Samuel Miller, 1808

There is an opinion out there that Thomas Jefferson meant for there to be a wall between state and church.  It is cited over and over again by the misinformed.   In seeming willful ignorance, those who hold this opinion seldom to never seek out clarification of their view.  Numerous times in my life, I have had to first hold those who have this view to searching out any provision in any founding document for anything referencing freedom from religion.

The phrase pertinent to a wall is in a letter to the Danbury Convention of Baptists in which Thomas Jefferson is responding to a direct inquiry from this convention.  The query was pertinent to the establishment of a national church.  The Baptists feared that the Congregationalists would become the national church and worried as to what that might mean to and for them.  Jefferson’s reply was that the churches were protected from governmental interference.  Also, that there would not be any established national church.  The lessons of and from Europe and all of its doctrinal warfare having been learned by our studious founders.

Here again in 1808, we find Jefferson had not changed his mind.  Neither did the federal government until a justice who was more ignorant than wise interjected a misunderstanding of that phrase as a footnote to a mid-20th century United States Supreme Court decision.  The atheists and secularists have latched onto an ill referenced footnote for more than it should have ever been worth.  I think it’s time for that ride to be over.  If you are a believing person, it’s up to us to call this out and then question the modernistic interferences that are going on.

It’s not about ‘hate’.  It’s about love.  God’s love for us.  Our reciprocal love for God.  And our right to act on our free consciences as we as individuals understand this.  We need to bring an end to some nebulous nexus that has been used to suppress ‘freedom of religion’.   We need to assert our rightful role in the public square.  To paraphrase a protest slogan of not so long ago, “We are here! We are believers! And we are here to stay!!”

Please keep in mind that I am not suggesting intolerance toward others.  I am suggesting we assert ourselves as Christians tolerant of other beliefs and ways and even non-belief.  It’s simply time to stop apologizing for our beliefs.   Time to realize what our founding fathers intended and to bring back the best of Western Civilization instead of trying to eradicate its traces from the future.