There is an establishment clause and more. You can even go back into the personal writings and easily see many of our founding fathers were Deists. One of their main goals was to see to it that what had happened in England with the Church of England being so intertwined in government that it actually was the government NEVER happened here in America.
They argued amongst themselves quite a bit before putting the final form down on paper. Their personal writing can give us insight into what each man thought but in the end what matters is what they enshrined as law in the highest law of the land. And what they did was to create a document that limited Congress but did not limit the individual states or individual men or the organizations that men formed.
I would disagree. It would be wrong to allow both the benefit from a religious exemption because a church has a protection from government and at the same time intentionally become an organized political tool creating government.
Nevertheless that is what they created. A situation in which churches could influence government as much as they wanted to through the same channels as anyone else would while the hands of government were tied.
Like I said I'd like to see these regulations strengthened. What individual church patrons do or say is not the same thing as an organized church hierarchy campaigning and raising money for an individual candidate or Political Party.
How about what just two church members decide to do? Would you permit just two church members to have free speech rights? What about three? Four? how large does a group have to be before it looses it's right to free speech?
Absolutely right... no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States." is the standard set by the government for the government, and with darn good reason. It stops people from being disqualified for any government position because of any religion no matter how unpopular or no religious beliefs at all.
yup.
Individual voters can base their votes on anything. But the fact that our founding father when to such lengths to create not just a "Christian" state speaks volumes... as I've mentioned before.
True that. It speaks to what they wrote: that they felt Christianity would flourish the most if the state did not become entangled with it. They felt that if one sect of Christianity never became
established then as a whole it would do well and nourish this nation.
Oh absolutely not hard to document at all. Even if you take away all the pseudo-Christian religious cults... David Koresh, Jim Jones and the like you have several mainstream Evangelists peddling a Christian only country and even going to crazy extremes like proclaiming God put Christians on this earth to kill Muslims (Reverend Rod Parsley 2008). Reverend Hagee would be another example... and their are hundreds of somewhat smaller or at least lesser known mainstream Christian Evangelist Cult types that promote much, much worse than even Parsley & Hagee.
Well so far none of those has been demonstrated by you to want a theocracy. But let's pretend that you accomplished your goal, then you will have named just a few. Which would still make your fear of crazy evangelicals to be more paranoia than reality.
Their utopia would be a country run by a Christian form of "God's Law" and not the Government's Laws. Very Taliban like... only it has a much lesser chance of ever holding because we live in a free society. Most would not give that up even for a particular religious belief.
I still have not seen who the "their" is who want a country run by Christian law. The closest you have come is Parsleys alleged desire for Christians to kill Muslims which would be an example of lawlessness and not an example of a theocracy.
