thesoulpurposedotorg

We often hear that this country was founded by Christians for the purpose of freedom of worship. We hear this so often that to question it’s historical accuracy is sometimes seen as apostacy. I recommend the works of David Korten to learn a more accurate history. In the American Baptist seminary from which I graduated in 1986, I learned a bit of this. First, we were not founded on the separation of church and state. The various colonies had their own state religion and the determination to force ones’ religion on the rest of the state (whether that religion be Puritanism or Catholicism or whatever) was a part of the plan. The Baptists were quite the minority out there in the dinky state of Rhode Island. They literally fought for the separation of church in state with their lives.
Thomas Jefferson was himself a Deist Deism rejected religion in general and Christianity in particular. Their understanding of God was God as the clockmaker of the Universe who then left the Universe to function on it’s own.
There is clearly a movement away from the separation of church and state in our current political winds of the USA. If we lose that, we lose the freedom to seek and to speak of God who speaks to us. A politically acceptable religion and sets of approved beliefs and ministers is not the Way of Christ. The god projected through a state religion is more like Zeus than like Abba, the Father God revealed to us by Jesus Christ, the Divine Lover who is not owned by any nation or any race, the Creator who seeks us, the One who cannot be captured by words or images but embraced by faith alone.