beaconchurches

Divided By God: America’s Church-State Problem–And What We Should Do About it

by Noah Feldman

c. 2007

This is a book everyone should read though it’s not the most readable book I have read.

Noah Feldman spent six years researching the problem of the seperation of Church and State and presents the historical facts in a well-organized manner. For instance, the reason there is no state religion in the US is because there is no one sovereign but ALL the people are sovereign so all the people’s religions are the religion of the land. The reason for public school and daily Bible reading and prayer in the US were because a sovereign people should be equally educated and taught the morals of the land and the Bible was deemed to be the best way to teach those morals.

Almost from the start, there has been an outcry over the way the schools were set up. Catholics complained because the King James Version of the Bible was used and not the Catholic Bible. They actually went to court over it and demanded money to run their own schools or for the King James Bible to be removed from the classrooms and replaced with Catholic Bibles or just removed. And they were just the largest and most vocal group.

This is a well-researched work. Feldman notes that the Constitutional amendment dealing with freedom of religion allows everyone to form their own religion but deals only with the Federal laws and allows states to make their own. In that he notes that many states paid clergy with tax money. He also notes that the Federal government delivered mail 7 days a week up until early in the 20th century simply because it didn’t want to give the idea that it was endorsing one religion’s sabbath over another’s.

Feldman doesn’t stop until the present day and then he adds his own insights into where he thinks the debate has gone and where it would be better off going. Well worth reading his insights and suggestions. This debate is not so new nor so one-sided as we might think.