The Myth of the Separation of Church and State
Monday, October 19, 2009 3:34 AM
The words separation of church and state don't appear in any official government documents authored by the founding fathers. This concept and these particular words were invented by an ACLU attorney named Leo Pfeffer in 1947 in the Supreme Court case of Everson versus Board of Education of Ewing Township. That liberal supreme court imposed it on the nation by a 5 to 4 vote. The ACLU and other anti-Christian organizations and individuals have used it to harass Christians with ever since. It is also used by evolutionists to try to keep a theistic explanation of origins out of the public schools. Many young people today are not aware of the fact that this concept is an ACLU invention, and that it is the extreme opposite of what our founding fathers actually intended. In other words, there is virtually no constitutional support whatsoever for it. Let's examine two of the most common myths about the founding fathers that most public school students are being taught today because of the history revisionists.
Myth #1: Jefferson's letter to the Danbury Baptists is the basis for separation of church and state
Some misguided people try to claim that this quote from Thomas Jefferson establishes the "separation of church and state" that we now have today:
"Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God; that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship; that the legislative powers of government reach actions only and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,†thus building a wall of separation between Church and State".
The first problem with that assertion is that this quote is not from an official government document. The second is that it was Jefferson's original intent that this meant that the church was to be protected from the government, not the reverse (which is the case today).
Myth #2: The founding fathers were "deists"
This is a common argument used by secular history revisionists that attempts to distract attention away from the fact that the majority of the founding fathers were committed Christians. In fact, 27 of our nation's 56 founding fathers had Christian seminary degrees! That would hardly qualify them as deists.
How does the ACLU explain away the October 11, 1782 congressional proclamation that declared Thanksgiving Day a day the nation was to give thanks to God for a variety of blessings?
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