There has been a debate occurring in these pages concerning the separation of church and state, precipitated by the use of prayer at Eureka City Council meetings instigated by Mayor Frank Jager. It is ironic that one letter writer cited the Puritans, who established Massachusetts Bay Colony, as a reason that religion in government was proper in the U.S. It was persecution from established state religion (Anglican) in England that caused the Puritans to flee to New England. Unfortunately, not long after the Puritans became established here, they began religious persecution of their own, most dramatically in the hanging of four Quakers in 1650 and the imprisoning of 4,000 more. These are the people who instigated the Salem Witch Trials.
Many Quakers fled to Nantucket Island, where the prevailing free thinkers tolerated them. When the Quakers multiplied and became the governing force there, they persecuted those who did not adhere to their particular form of Quakerism, which included Quakers as well as non-Quakers.
The idea that separation of church and state was needed for the protection of religion was clearly formulated by Roger Williams, a Puritan minister who was driven out of Massachusetts Bay Colony for preaching tolerance of other religions and ethnic groups, in particular Native Americans. He felt that everyone had the right of freedom of religion and that separation of church and state was necessary to protect that freedom. It was he who penned the term “a wall of separation between church and state” long before Thomas Jefferson cited it. In 1636, Roger Williams walked 105 miles from Massachusetts through winter snow to found Providence Plantations (Rhode Island) as a safe haven for Baptists, Quakers and Jews. One of the first laws passed there forbade slavery. Although a Puritan minister himself, he understood that the best protection for religion was to keep government from being involved in it.
Officially sanctioned wars between religions drip blood through the pages of history. Christians and Moslems battled during the crusades and in Andalusian Spain. Hindu and Muslim slaughtered each other in northern India and Pakistan and do so to this day. In addition to wars between religions, vicious wars between different interpretations of the same religion are common. Europe has been wracked for centuries by bloody wars involving Catholic vs. Protestant, the most recent being the violence in Northern Ireland. Similar violence between Shia and Sunni curse the Moslem world in Iraq today. The Nazi government in Germany slaughtered its Jewish citizens. Religious intolerance and hatred will always exist, but permitting the government to endorse one side or the other only adds fuel to the fire.
Separation of church and state is not an attack on religion, but rather the best defense of freedom of religion. It is because our government cannot endorse religion that we have avoided the official persecution of religious minorities common elsewhere. The founding fathers wisely recognized that keeping the government from endorsing or engaging in religious practices was the best way to protect all religious beliefs and to prevent government from regulating private spiritual matters. They knew this because they had multiple examples of vicious religious intolerance by established governments in their countries of origin, and had seen similar horrors arise here before independence. The Constitution defends your right to practice your religion free from government intrusion.
It should also be borne in mind that any endorsement of religion by the government, no matter how benign seeming, excludes minority beliefs. Peoples of minority faiths and nonbelievers are also citizens and taxpayers. The government has no right to exclude them.
Frederica Aalto resides in Patricks Point and is a member of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State.