History

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/opinion/07meacham.html?em

"Thomas Jefferson said that his bill for religious liberty in Virginia was "meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindu, and infidel of every denomination." When George Washington was inaugurated in New York in April 1789, Gershom Seixas, the hazan of Shearith Israel, was listed among the city's clergymen (there were 14 in New York at the time), a sign of acceptance and respect. The next year, Washington wrote the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, R.I., saying, "happily the government of the United States ... gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance. ... Everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid."

"Andrew Jackson resisted bids in the 1820s to form a "Christian party in politics." Abraham Lincoln buried a proposed "Christian amendment" to the Constitution to declare the nation's fealty to Jesus. Theodore Roosevelt defended William Howard Taft, a Unitarian, from religious attacks by supporters of William Jennings Bryan."

Today, Americans are stupider than ever. There is gross misinformation about America's history of religious tolerance, and its struggle for religiously neutral government. But history shows that this is nothing new. Indeed, the most natural form of human governance is the theological dictatorship. America's great experiment is to go a different direction. But it is a unending struggle. Citizens are fighting to give up freedoms, individuality and privacy, and to create a "Christian" police state in America. And it is an ironic price of freedom that they must be allowed to continue their struggle, just as others struggle against them. Preserving freedom is not easy in a nation founded on a principle of government by the people.