Self-Evident Truth

5/7/2026

The comments in Dave Cooper’s April 23 op-ed, “Church/state separation pollutes political thought,” gave me pause.
Cooper would do well to refrain from using quotes completely out of context, and to check his facts more carefully since some of those quotes were incorrectly attributed. Quotes with no reference to time or purpose do not prove a point but serve only to confuse or manipulate.
One point Cooper is missing is that it does not matter what personal religious beliefs the founders and framers of the Constitution held.
What matters is their ideas about how those beliefs should play out in the structuring of our government and the application of that structure to the people.
The founders did not imply that religious or moral ideals should never play a part in determining policy and procedure.
They were advocating against establishing one true religious ideal as the sole influence.
They make that perfectly clear in many places, but the two most easily referenced and understood are the First Amendment to the Constitution and the Treaty of Tripoli.
The First Amendment of 10 ratified in the Bill of Rights begins: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof …”
Reading about the debates that occurred during the ratification period, you can see that addressing freedom of religion in the very first words in the Bill of Rights is no accident.
Simply put, the clause says government cannot make any laws favoring one religion or saying one religion is the state religion. The second clause says government cannot stop people from practicing their religion, no matter what it is.
Pretty clear.
The Treaty of Tripoli was written by a Jeffersonian republican and signed in 1796, just seven years after the ratification of the Constitution. This treaty was ratified unanimously and without debate by the Senate and signed by President John Adams.
Article 11 states: “The Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.”
Looking at these early documents, the writings of the leaders of the founding era, and following the history of the country for the subsequent 250 years, it seems clear that this is a country with a lot of Christians, but it is not a Christian country.
Intentionally.
We should also note that although the word “God” does appear in some writings of the era, it does not appear anywhere in the Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence carefully used the word “Creator.”
The religious right’s worldview often conflates any mention of God to Christianity, giving a very narrow interpretation to many writings.
Cooper implies that cruelties committed by Iran and ISIS are justification for establishing Christian ideals in the U.S. What he is missing is that religious authoritarianism eventually leads to oppression of the “other” no matter what the state religion is.
Compared to many of the European nations that have had state religions in the past 250 years, many of them Christian, the United States has long had a higher level of religious enthusiasm.
Religious authoritarianism breeds more authoritarianism and leads to division and “othering” of the people.
The religious right loves to malign the phrase “wall of separation,” citing that it was “just in a letter.” It amuses me to think that these are the same people who revere the books of the Christian Bible referred to as the Epistles: Galatians, Romans, Corinthians and other books. Contextually, these were letters written by a disciple named Paul and aimed at a particular group of people in a particular geographic area and had a specific purpose for their writing.
Could we offer the same respect to that letter of Thomas Jefferson’s? Context matters.
To read the Op-Ed by Dave Cooper that inspired this writing Click here →

Religious beliefs vs. civil rights

3/9/2026

The Brownsburg, Indiana school corporation is the latest victim of the notion that “religious liberty” means you may be at liberty to ignore public laws and regulations, as long as you can persuade a court that you are doing it because of your sincerely held religious belief. 

Last week, the news broke that the school district agreed to pay $650,000 to one of its former teachers who had resigned after refusing to address a transgender student by the student’s self-chosen name. The teacher, John Kluge, sued under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits, among other things, religious discrimination against employees. He was supported by Alliance Defending Freedom, which has made itself a big name by asserting religious exemptions to public policies. 

Note that the school district had not restricted Kluge because of his religious beliefs — it attempted to limit what he could do with his religious beliefs in regard to students. 

Another federal law, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, was cited 12 years ago to let Hobby Lobby deny insurance coverage for an abortifacient contraceptive because of the company owners’ religious beliefs. 

So, in both cases, religious freedom was interpreted to exempt one party from legally established expectations of behavior to another party  

The United States Constitution protects free exercise of religion, and the crunch word there is “exercise.” Earlier courts ruled that people cannot exercise their religious beliefs to legally use cannabis or peyote in religious rituals, even though such use is not violating the rights of anyone else. In other situations, men have been able to exercise their religious beliefs as conscientious objectors to not be drafted into the military but have been required to do public service instead. 

It seems to me that cases like Brownsburg and Hobby Lobby are moving America away from a concept of equality under the law. When one party can persuade the court that their religious beliefs are more important than the civil rights of the other parties, then that is not equality. Refusing to address a child by the child’s chosen name because of a religious belief sounds pretty close to refusing to serve a customer because he is boasting a devilish tattoo or because she is wearing a hijab — or, as we know all too well, because of “the curse of Ham.” 

Correct me if I’m wrong, but my belief is that this recent trans-bashing phenomenon is based much more in contemporary politics than in established religious tenets. Richly endowed groups such as Alliance Defending Freedom are using religious notions to exert political power, and like women seeking emergency abortions, trans children are easy targets. 

If using the convenient weapon of theology to mistreat another person is allowed to become the norm, then it defiles the traditional American concept of religious liberty.