There's a reason we keep pews, politics separate

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

By JOEL CONNELLY
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

Since America is observing the Lewis and Clark bicentennial, at a time when its political divisions are spilling into the pews, it's time to share this gem of wisdom from the president who launched the Corps of Discovery.

"Say nothing of my religion: It is known to God and myself alone," observed Thomas Jefferson. "Its evidence before the world is to be sought in my life. If it has been honest and dutiful to society, the religion which has regulated it cannot be a bad one."

Jefferson was not given to litmus tests. He believed, with fervor, that to link church and state in any way would do harm to both.

Sadly, 200 years later, religion is being used as a cudgel in a closely fought election.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/connelly/196634_joel25.html

[whistle]

1. By a far less honerable and certainly not an honest president.....

...dump Bush

[dave502d]

2. Jefferson was right.

Just think if we put religion in schools,the kids would kill each other by the time they got to 8th grade.

[realFedUp]

3. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. writes about founding father's religion also today

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-schlesinger26oct26,1,2144685.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions

The White House Wasn't Always God's House
By Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was a top aide to President Kennedy. His most recent book is a memoir, "A Life in the 20th Century: Innocent Beginnings."

October 26, 2004

George Washington was a nominal Anglican who rarely stayed for Communion. John Adams was a Unitarian, which Trinitarians abhorred as heresy. Thomas Jefferson, denounced as an atheist, was actually a deist who detested organized religion and who produced an expurgated version of the New Testament with the miracles eliminated. Jefferson and James Madison, a nominal Episcopalian, were the architects of the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom. James Monroe was another Virginia Episcopalian. John Quincy Adams was another Massachusetts Unitarian. Andrew Jackson, pressed by clergy members to proclaim a national day of fasting to seek God's help in combating a cholera epidemic, replied that he could not do as they wished "without feeling that I might in some degree disturb the security which religion now enjoys in this country in its complete separation from the political concerns of the general government."

In the 19th century, all presidents routinely invoked God and solicited his blessing. But religion did not have a major presence in their lives. Abraham Lincoln was the great exception. Nor did our early presidents use religion as an agency for mobilizing voters. "I would rather be defeated," said James A. Garfield, "than make capital out of my religion."

Nor was there any great popular demand that politicians be men of faith. In 1876, James G. Blaine, an aspirant for the Republican presidential nomination, selected Col. Robert G. Ingersoll, a famed orator but a notorious scoffer at religion, to deliver the nominating speech: The pious knew and feared Ingersoll as "The Great Agnostic"; a 21st century equivalent of Ingersoll would have been booed off the platform at the Republican convention of 2004.

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