Posted on 02/28/2012 8:14:16 PM PST by Mariner
You and I agree on that. But the idea that a church is a box or a specific group is mistaken. Fr many Protestants and Evangelicals the individual carries responsibility and authority of the church as well
Which is exactly why you are a statist. Fisher AMes penned the words of the First Amendment. Read about him a bit and then read the link below which is Rehnquists dissent in Wallace v Jaffree. It may wake you out of your statist slumber.
You're backtracking pal. You said the "seperation of church and state is absolute". This would eliminate any Pastor, Priest or Rabbi from serving in Congress. This of course is unconstitutional since there can be no religious test and is only embraced by secular statist nuts.
Secondly absolute seperation would make the crosses over my Father's and my 10 Uncles graves unconstitutional because they are buried in Veterans cemetaries which is public land.
Next absolute separation would ban faith based organizations from bidding on government contracts. That is Soviet Union stuff.
I could go on but what's the point, you're a dedicated statist nut who thinks the US Constitution favors the secular over those of faith. Right out of Stalin/Trotsky playbook.
But it was not the Constitution that decided this. Father Drinan’s religious superiors were uncomfortable with him in Congress. It probably had more to do with Drinan voting against Catholic doctrine on some social issues than anything else. If I remember correctly Drinan was to the Left of Che Guevara.
The Soviet Union did not have contract bids. They had five year plans and the population as slave labor on collective farms.
We are on the same page. The Founders set the wall just in the right place. Lets keep it there, mostly for religions sake.
Article VIAll debts contracted and engagements entered into, before the adoption of this Constitution, shall be as valid against the United States under this Constitution, as under the Confederation.
This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.
The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the members of the several state legislatures, and all executive and judicial officers, both of the United States and of the several states, shall be bound by oath or affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.
Agreed! Some have chosen to let the state run the church!
There is no question or roomfor interpretation, there can be NO RELIGIOUS TEST for any office. Unless your name is Ginsberg I suppose.
{I am bashing Santorum.} and every Christian that supported him, because you are the one confused about the Constitution. Are you so indoctrinated by the Seperation of Church and State crowd that you believe that a president should not and does not pray before committing troups to battle?
Maybe you should look into the prayer books that Washington penned himself, and maybe at the same time be glad that he committed himself to the will of God, and the service of our country.
Churches have a role in the "operation" of the State every time the State executes a murderer. That's the lex talionis, which is found nowhere in the U.S. Constitution. But it's found in the Bible.
Your turn.
That must be why the 18th Amendment, the Volstead Act, never passed.
You wrote something close to what I was considering writing, and I agree with your main point.
A minor caveat: the word “evangelical” **WAS** in use in 1960 — the National Association of Evangelicals had been founded a decade and a half earlier, and its leaders were working to revive a term with a much earlier heritage dating back to the 1500s that literally means “biblical.” However, the word “fundamentalist” was more commonly used at the time to describe conservative Protestants who took the Bible literally.
Today, “fundamentalist” tends to have a clear connection with separatist denominations, and that meaning was certainly understood in 1960, but a generation earlier the fundamentalist-modernist controversy was raging **INSIDE** the mainline denominations, not between mainline denominations and fundamentalist seceders, and in groups like the Southern Presbyterians, Southern Baptists, and Southern Methodists, that fight was still underway in 1960.
Even then, however, the word “fundamentalist” didn't correctly describe all of the people John F. Kennedy was addressing, though it probably described a significant percentage of his Houston audience of pastors.
John F. Kennedy had to deal with virulent anti-Catholic bias which in its form appeared to be Protestant but actually had its origin in two very different causes.
One type of anti-Catholic bias took a form which dated back to the Reformation, and to a long history of Roman Catholic involvement in secular politics which was of a very different kind than what we see today. Not only did many conservative Bible-believing Protestants oppose Roman Catholic doctrines such as the Mass, veneration of Mary and the saints, etc., they had reason to fear, based on Roman Catholic history, that a Roman Catholic president would not be fully loyal to the United States but rather be subject to a foreign civil power.
I need to emphasize here that I'm not saying that fear was valid in 1960; my point is that given Roman Catholic history in the 1600s and 1700s, and the lack of experience of most Americans with Roman Catholic civil rulers in the modern era, the fear was understandable even if it was wrong.
While those concerns may well have predominated with many laypeople and pastors in the South, by the 1960s a very different type of theology had come to dominate most of the mainline denominations. A mainline Protestant in 1960 may have used words that sounded like longstanding Reformed, Lutheran, or Wesleyan doctrine while objecting to the Mass or prayers to Mary and the saints or pilgrimages for miraculous healing. However, the liberalism of much of mainline Protestantism by 1960 didn't object to those things on the basis of biblical exegesis but rather on liberal grounds that Roman Catholicism is superstitious, unscientific, and irrational, namely, that Roman Catholicism posed a barrier to free thought and human progress.
John F. Kennedy, as a Roman Catholic candidate for president, could have given a speech stating that he shared the moral convictions of conservative Protestants and would seek to work with Protestants to sustain and promote a commonly shared American morality in conflict against rising secularism at home and a foreign threat of atheism from Communist sources abroad.
In doing so, JFK could have said that much as the Catholics of Baltimore had cast their lot with patriotic American colonists to build the United States, he would work to find areas where his Catholicism would support rather than oppose the pre-existing Protestant consensus.
That's basically what Rick Santorum is saying now.
The problem is that JFK's agenda was very different from Rick Santorum. Voters in 1960 may well not have known much if anything about JFK's personal morality, but it's become obvious in hindsight that JFK didn't give a speech like that because he didn't believe in Roman Catholic authority any more than the Protestant ministers of Houston.
I can work with a conservative Roman Catholic like Rick Santorum. I don't agree with his theology, but the decision of the Catholics of Maryland to support the American Revolution gained for Catholics a legitimate place, under the original intent of the Constitution, to practice and promote their religious views.
Quite frankly, while my theological differences with Rick Santorum are vast, they're nowhere near as great as my differences with liberal Protestants. That has implications for the civil realm as well, and it means I can work with Santorum and others like him in the pro-life movement and other fronts of the culture wars.
And who would be stupid enough to credit JFK's statement at full face value in a hot and dicey political situation with the presidency on the line?
With his daddy meeting Sam Giancana and Dick Daley in a Chicago back room?
Santorum used the term influence. Influence is not power.
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