Читать книгу Keeping the Republic - Christine Barbour - Страница 136

The briefest look around the world tells us what happens when politics and religion are allowed to mix. When it comes to conflicts over religion, over our fundamental beliefs about the world and the way life should be lived, the stakes are enormous. Passions run deep, and compromise is difficult. In the United States, where a majority of people are religious, religious battles tend to take place in the courts, under the guidelines set out by the First Amendment.

Although not all the founders endorsed religious freedom for everyone, some of them, notably Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, cherished the notion of a universal freedom of conscience—the right of all individuals to believe as they pleased. Jefferson wrote that the First Amendment built “a wall of separation between church and State.”¹⁴ The founders based their view of religious freedom on two main arguments. First, history has shown, from the Holy Roman Empire to the Church of England, that when church and state are linked, all individual freedoms are in jeopardy. After all, if government is merely the arm of God, what power of government cannot be justified? Furthermore, religion can divide society into the factions that Madison saw as the primary threat to republican government and individual liberty. A second argument for practicing religious freedom is based on the effect that politics can have on religious concerns. Early champions of a separation between politics and religion worried that the spiritual purity and sanctity of religion would be ruined if it was mixed with the worldly realm of politics, with its emphasis on power and influence.¹⁵