Did the Founding Fathers intend to ensure freedom of religion or freedom from religion? Phil Burress, of Citizens for Community Values, and Barry W. Lynn, of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, offer starkly different answers to that question.
Burress, director of the Cincinnati-based religious organization, says that Judeo-Christian principles played a central role in American politics beginning with the Continental Convention of 1787. "God governs in the affairs of men. .
.. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?
...
Without His concurring aid, we shall succeed in this political building no better than the builders of Babel." At Franklin?s urging, the delegates then knelt to pray.
The framers of the Constitution, Burress said, "wanted to make sure there wasn?t any one sect that people were told they had to join." But they had no intent of banning religion from government, he said, noting that church services were once held in an old U.
S. Capitol, and federal buildings today have religious mottos and artwork. Lynn agrees there was no specific, word-for-word reference to separation of church and state in the Constitution.
But he says that was clearly the intent of the Fathers, including Thomas Jefferson, a deist, who in an 1802 letter to a Baptist group referred to "building a wall of separation between Church State." "There is no way we were founded as a Christian nation," Lynn said. "The majority of the framers of the Constitution knew exactly what they were doing.
" The separation concept became more firmly entrenched with U.S. Supreme Court cases that dealt with tax-exemptions for churches in 1947 and political-activity restrictions backed by Lyndon Johnson in 1954.
"Partisan politics corrupts the church. It always has, it always will," Lynn said. "Government should not be in the business of resolving what are essentially theological debates.
?We certainly shouldn?t have elections for what appear to be the board of deacons or the College of Cardinals.
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