Hard to believe, ours is a nation literally founded on a principle of church/state separation, when most current political emphasis, especially that of evangelically driven single minded, religionist zealots, seems obsessively focused on the opposite. As this commentator noted in a two-thousand twelve essay, it was not hostility to Christianity that moved our founders to downplay it, it was the need to ensure religious neutrality. The Treaty of Tripoli, an agreement between the United States and the Muslim Region of North Africa, signed in 1797, by then President George Washington and approved by the Senate, under John Adams, states flatly: “The Government of The United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian Religion.”
This in no way places a restriction on religious belief or practice by any citizen, only a responsibility to ensure the same for everyone else. It literally requires that we all show tolerance and respect for the beliefs or non-beliefs of others and refrain from intolerant argument or actions to the contrary. It also bars those who may have over-zealously deemed themselves as self-appointed emissaries or spokespersons, from exercising such unsanctioned power. It thus makes the vision of pluralism a more viable reality, at a time when we appear to be more than ever, in need of embracing it.
This fragile ‘miraculous’ experiment in people’s governance can never succeed, as the result of an imposition of Divine will or power, as imposed by self-appointed emissaries, driven by an ungovernable ambition to “play God.” Only by respecting our differences and working together to achieve equal justice, equal opportunity and equal freedom for all, can we ensure the kind of future our founders wisely envisioned and enshrined in the Constitution and its even more specific ‘First Amendment.’
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