In arguing for church-state separation, we lose sight of real religious freedom | Opinion

Recently the Herald Leader published an essay by Rachel Laser, President of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. This essay challenges the assertions made in that essay.

Laser argues that there is a separation of church and state in the nation’s ethos that forbids anyone expressing their religion in the public square. In reality this is a direct contradiction of the national ethos as expressed in the First Amendment’s prohibition against the government passing any law proscribing a citizen’s right to freely express their religion.

She supports plaintiffs suing to end abortion restrictions who argue such restrictions are an unconstitutional insertion of other’s religion into public policy. Laser’s argument, with no historical or constitutional basis, would mean that a Baptist could not pursue prohibition nor a Catholic abortion bans.

Laser and the plaintiffs are insisting that the entire national community accept their values. She and the plaintiffs are arguing for and pursuing fundamental values arising out of their own belief system, a devout secularism, if you will, but want everyone to think they are not bringing any religion into the public square. Of course they are. Laser must proceed as she does so all other value sets can be banned.

In all civilizations politics is a reflection of culture and culture is a reflection of religion, that is the ultimate values and understanding of reality that a people, in order to be a people, hold in common. The founding fathers insisted and admonished the citizenry that the United States could not long endure absent a Christian ethos that would inform public policy. Americans, as Tocqueville noted, inextricably intertwined free religious faith and expression with free government, the one supporting the other

In the 1990s, President Clinton and Democrats and Republicans in congress reiterated that sentiment with passage and signing of the Freedom of Religion Restoration Act. Clinton strongly insisted Americans had a constitutional right to bring their religion into the public square, to have faith inform public policy. This all got obscured with President Obama’s insistence that Americans needed to leave their religion at home and by the simultaneous stepped-up drive to ban challenges to new gender understandings and to abortion understood as solely an individual matter.

Laser also insists that the public cannot post the Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments can be displayed so long as the motive is not to privilege a particular religion. The doors of the Supreme Court building and the wall behind the justices’ seats have an inscription of the Ten Commandments denoting a Western civilization well-spring — the rule of Law. Also, contrary to Laser’s belief set, the bible can be taught in public schools as cultural/historical study, not proselytizing. Otherwise it would be very difficult to teach the nation’s heritage, western civilization, at any level of public education.

Laser upends reality by creating a bogeyman, the White Christian Nationalist who, she writes, does not represent America’s core values, that is, her values. But there are very few Americans pursuing a racist, white nation. There are, however, a lot of white and black Americans seeking to preserve a national Christian ethos that had triumphed over slavery and racism and that until the 1970s had united Americans in a common understanding of gender/family, free speech, religious freedom, and pride in nation. In using the slur she ridicules the Christian ethos that has undergirded the nation.

Back to western civilization, informed as it is by the Judeo-Christian religion. Ms. Laser pursues her moral/ethical understanding and her definition of religious freedom in direct opposition to the old western morality, that in turn informs such traditional values as real religious freedom and self-governance. She must argue as she does and disparage those who hold to traditional values because to achieve her vision of separation of church and state with only her religion in the public square there must be an end to western civilization.

J. Larry Hood is a retired state government employee and has been adjunct faculty at area colleges.