Quote:
Originally Posted by Zen653
If my tone somehow conveys that I'm upset by Washington's lack of religiosity, that's not at all my intent. To the contrary, I find it remarkable that he and most other early presidents had the courage to truly separate church and state. I find it baffling that our early leaders understood secular governance better than our current ones. Usually as countries industrialize, they move further away from religion. We seem to be the exception.
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The founders of America were reacting to the circumstances of their more immediate past. The 17th Century had been a religious/political catastrophe. An enormous amount of blood and treasure was wasted in horrible, useless wars where the crown was linked to one faith and everyone of other faiths were plotting to replace the crown's wearer with someone of congruent faith. It isn't fair to call these religious wars only, but it was definitely the fusion of church and state which was most directly responsible for the disasters which followed. The Thirty Years War in Germany resulted in the the worst man made European calamity until WW I. The English Civil War, while less bloody, meant that England spent an entire century more or less consumed with instability and civil strife.
It is natural then, that those building the American experiment, would very much have in mind a desire to construct a government not plagued by the sorts of problems which convulsed the old world the previous century. Their solution was to divide church and state, fix it so that political power was not linked to any one faith which generated resentment and rebellion from those outside that faith. Their idea was to keep the government out of the religion business, it was to neither establish one, nor persecute any.