I’m a Pagan. We have many Gods, with widely varying sets of standards. Are we going to amend the Constitution in favor of Hera, Goddess of marriage, or Aphrodite, Goddess of unbridled love? Do we mandate the wild, ecstatic worship of the goat-god Pan, or the more sedate contemplation of Sophia, Goddess of wisdom?

I’m also Jewish by birth and ancestry. Jews do have scripture, and we’ve been debating the fine points of its interpretation for two thousand years. So, whose interpretations do we mandate into law? Akiva or Hillel? Rambam? How far back do we go? Should we stone adulterers, forbid the collection of interest on debts, require all farmers to leave the land fallow one year in seven? How about live animal sacrifices at the Temple in Jerusalem—could we get the Israeli government, the Palestinian authority and perhaps the U.N. on board for that?

We’d do well to remember that the Constitution was framed by deeply religious men (and, undoubtedly, some women in the background that we never hear about.) They kept church and state separate because they had suffered from the oppression of a state religion. They knew that the divine reveals her/himself to each person with a unique face, and that to interpose the force of law and the strictures of state authority into that encounter is to violate our deepest freedom and constrain our souls. To assume that any one individual or tradition knows all there is to know about God—or Goddess—is a form of idolatry, for it limits our conception of the great creativity that moves the worlds.