{"id":22898,"date":"2017-07-06T00:29:30","date_gmt":"2017-07-06T00:29:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=22898"},"modified":"2017-07-06T00:29:30","modified_gmt":"2017-07-06T00:29:30","slug":"long-live-the-secular-state","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=22898","title":{"rendered":"Long live the secular state!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Jon Mark Beilue has done it again. He has written a spot-on column for the Amarillo Globe-News that I want to share\u00a0here.<\/a><\/p>\n

I won’t restate my friend’s thoughts, other than to echo his notion that the founding fathers created a marvelous governing document that has withstood many challenges over time.<\/p>\n

They knew that the nation’s European immigrants came here to flee religious persecution, so they wrote into the Constitution’s First Amendment that there should be no law that established a state religion; indeed, of all the liberties protected in the First Amendment, they mentioned religion first.<\/p>\n

Here, though, is an additional point I want to make above Beilue’s excellent essay.<\/p>\n

It is that the United States to this very day remains a significantly more religious country than virtually all the nations of Europe. Americans are more inclined to attend worship services than Europeans. I am aware that church attendance is declining in the United States, but it remains far greater than it is throughout Europe, where worship attendance has plummeted for decades.<\/p>\n

Why is that important? Because many nations of Europe have state religions. The United States has none. The Church of England? A state religion. Catholicism is ingrained in the governing documents of several European nations.<\/p>\n

I make this U.S.-Europe connection only because those original immigrants came across The Pond from Europe<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The Constitution stipulates that there must be “no religious test” applied to candidates for public office at any level. The word “Christian” does not appear in the Constitution.<\/p>\n

Were the founders fueled by their personal religious faith when they wrote the Constitution? Certainly. I don’t doubt that for a moment. However, they knew better than to write their faith into the nation’s government document.<\/p>\n

As Jon Mark Beilue writes: “Our Founding Fathers, they knew what they were doing.”<\/p>\n\n

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Jon Mark Beilue has done it again. He has written a spot-on column for the Amarillo Globe-News that I want to share\u00a0here. I won’t restate my friend’s thoughts, other than to echo his notion that the founding fathers created a marvelous governing document that has withstood many challenges over time. They knew that the nation’s … Continue reading Long live the secular state!<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,15],"tags":[179,1738,2568,7175,5043],"class_list":["post-22898","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-national-news","category-religious-news","tag-agn-media","tag-first-amendment","tag-jon-mark-beilue","tag-state-religion","tag-us-constitution"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22898","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22898"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22898\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22900,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22898\/revisions\/22900"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}