Separation of Church and State
5
One of the few issues on this list that was also around in 1776. The U.S. founders were, on the whole, stubborn agnostics who made little reference to divine ordinances. Jefferson famously pared down the bible to a 30-page booklet of useful ideas, taking out Christ and most of the silly OT stories. It's sad that this issue remains a matter of debate today, but this is the very reason the far right likes to exploit it: it's an issue they can't win in the United States, so they know that they can ride it to the end of time. From this basic fact arise several strands of fundamentalists: (1) the cynics, like the old Kevin Phillips, who see religion a la Machiavelli as an instrument of rule; (2) the masochists, like Pat Robertson, those who like to see themselves lose and the rest of us suffer in order to feed the sense of persecution they have inherited from extremist strains of Christianity; and (3) the theocrats, those like Bush, who would seem to prefer to live in a society like Saudi Arabia's; irony of ironies, the one electoral bloc that went unfailingly for Bush in 2000 was fundamentalist Muslims.
While the occasional reference to "god" might be harmless enough, the institutionalization of religious symbols on public property remains a constant danger and irritant. There is no reason why a dead man can't choose to put a cross on his own grave, but equally no reason why any elected official can endorse a particular religious figure like Christ in their courthouse.
UPDATE: I'm not sure why the personal beliefs of the Founding Fathers are really so critical to this debate, since it's the text of the Constitution, not the lives of those who wrote it, that's at stake. But there has been some unclarity about the word "agnostic." Perhaps it was a bad choice of word. What I meant is that the Founders did not believe that there could be such a thing as collective certainty about divine matters. Such certainty they saw as pernicious. Divine matters did
not belong to the category of knowledge (hence "a-gnostic," "not knowledge") but to individual conscience. They therefore took any attempt to provide institutional or collective recognition of religion as a grave threat to liberty. That's why Washington refused even to provide even the slightest hint of public endorsement of Christianity, and why Protestant ministers would for decades accuse him of atheism.
Meanwhile, in our own time, the "wall of separation" between church and state is being threatened today in ways that would have shocked anyone in 1787. We have a born-again (i.e., one who believes that Christ is specifically calls on each of us throughout our lives as a "savior") as president, we have government funding for "faith-based initiatives," we have divine memorabilia sitting on public property. That should offend anyone who cares about the Constitution, not to mention any true Protestant, who is commanded to reject any "graven images" anyway.
UPDATE 2: I'm glad Victor has quoted the Farewell Address. A great document if there ever was one. Notice that Washington says "religious principle," not "Christian" principle or even "God." He uses "religious" in the Latin sense of "social bond," in the spirit of a good Roman republican, like all the Founders were. He speaks of "national morality," not "Christian morality." There's nothing here that needs a god - it's a completely secular principle of virtue.
