In a world torn by religious, ethnic and geopolitical conflict, we can be thankful this Thanksgiving that, for the most part, our country has been spared that kind of strife.
A dedication to religious liberty for everyone, a passion for welcoming pluralism — not just tolerating it — and our constitutional construct that separates church and state have allowed us, for the most part, to avoid religious conflict and wars.
This is not brought about by accident, or even entirely by Providence.
Even though our liberty is a gift from God — not the result of an act of concession of the state — we have chosen to tailor our political institutions to protect that liberty. The wise architects of our republic separated church and state by adopting the first two provisions of the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights — forbidding government from meddling in religion or taking sides in religious disputes. These two clauses — no establishment and free exercise — working together, require government to be neutral toward religion — neither helping nor hurting religion, but turning it loose to allow people of faith to practice their religion, or not, as they see fit, not as government sees fit.
Our constitution, a decidedly secular document, bans religious tests for public office and, with adoption of the First Amendment’s religion clauses, our founders made it clear that one’s status in the civil community simply would not depend on one’s willingness to espouse any particular religious confession.
Precisely because of these traditions begun by our founders, and reaffirmed by our political culture, America is at once one of the most religious and the most religiously diverse nations on the face of the earth.
In this country we have not always gotten the relationship between church and state just right. But we have been able to ensure greater religious liberty than any other country I know.
The parting words of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor before she retired should be heeded by those who would be tempted to divorce religion from politics and those who want to merge church and state. She asked this question:
Those who would renegotiate the boundaries between church and state must answer a difficult question: why would we trade a system that has served us well for one that has served others so poorly?
So, this year I am thankful for early-Baptist freedom fighters — Roger Williams and John Leland — who showed us the way. I am grateful for our prescient founders — Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and George Mason — who had the courage to risk the radical idea that church and state are both better off when they are institutionally and functionally separate. And I am indebted to those sentinels of liberty — Sandra Day O’Connor, Hugo Black, and William Brennan — whose decisions on the Supreme Court reaffirmed the Baptist vision and our founders' wisdom and gave us a country and a culture that as avoided the religious and ethnic conflict that we see all around us today.
I thank God for America.
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