It is disgusting what is said today regarding ‘separation of church and state’. Too often what is quoted is simply fantasy. The following article was in the local newspaper and clarifies the separation clause. That reference means that the ‘state’ shall not define churches as government sanctioned entities.
By Don Volz — Guest Column published in the New Braunfels Herald-Zeitung, Friday, February 19, 2016
At the outset we need to get one thing straight. There is no “separation of church and state” language in the Constitution. Neither that phrase, nor any semblance of it, exists anywhere in
the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, or in the Federalist Papers that describe those documents.
The phrase “a wall of separation between church and state” first appeared in 1802, in President Thomas Jefferson’s response to a complaint received from a Baptist Association in Danbury, Connecticut. Historians agree that Jefferson’s letter was not an assertion that public discourse must be free from religious expression. In fact, Jefferson’s actual aim was quite the opposite —
he wanted public religious expression to be free from government restriction or coercion.
Jefferson strongly opposed the state-established churches that existed in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and other states at the time, but he knew that as President he had to respect them. Still, he was deeply committed to religious liberty, as evidenced by the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom that he wrote more than a decade earlier.
The purpose of Jefferson’s response to the Danbury Baptists was to reassure them that the First Amendment created a “wall of separation” to keep the state from interfering with their religious practices, not to somehow imprison or constrain their free exercise of religion.
Modernist liberal justices, atheists, secular humanists and their allies in the Democrat party have ignored the meaning and context of Jefferson’s words. They’ve distorted Jefferson’s intent by injecting a mythical “wall of separation” into American jurisprudence without any Constitutional or legal foundation whatsoever. They preach the phrase as if it were a bedrock principle of American law when it is nothing of the sort. They do so with the impudence of Adam and Eve, elevating man-made laws above the truly foundational “Laws of Nature and Nature’s God,” as Jefferson so eloquently named the latter in the Declaration of Independence.
Sadly, many Christian Democrats and “Progressives” use the mythical “wall of separation between church and state” to avoid confronting the glaring conflict between their professed Christianity and their party politics. In their private lives they claim to be Christian. Yet in their public lives, they endorse and sponsor decidedly un-Christian behaviors like abortion, infanticide, homosexual acts, sexual promiscuity, adultery, and euthanasia — behaviors that clearly conflict with “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God.” They claim to be Disciples of Christ, but in their public lives they are disciples of deceitful and untrustworthy leaders like Hillary Clinton, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama.
In this respect, many Christian Democrats increasingly exemplify “a house divided against itself.” We know from Jesus’ words in Mark 3:25 that such houses cannot stand.
Like our Founding Fathers before us, true Christians place God’s word above man-made law and party politics in every aspect of their lives. True Christians do not hide behind a mythical “wall of separation between church and state.” True Christians share the Gospel message through both their words and their actions. True Christians heed Jesus’ words of warning in Luke 17:2 and do not defend, support, enable or excuse the sinful behavior of others.
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