Church and State

I was driving down the freeway yesterday when I came across a car with this bumper sticker attached:

"Separate church and state"

There were other stickers on the vehicle promoting various liberal causes and disparaging President Bush, but the church and state sticker caught my interest. My mind drifted to the Constitutional debates and thought of the concerns the Founding Fathers' had to make sure that the Church was never corrupted by the State. We would not have a National Church (in the way the Church of England is the UK's National Church). Church and spiritual belief was too important; the State would not be allowed to interfere.

Fast-forward a couple of hundred years, and now we see a different spin. The Church, not the State, is the holder of all things evil. The Church, liberals worry, is trying to infiltrate and corrupt the State. This is not the case, but the Church is allowed to try to reform society, to improve the lot of the people both spiritually and temporally.

Still, all we see championed is "separate church and state," something that is not in the 1st amendment, as ruled recently by our judiciary. I don't know what the liberals fear about the church, especially since it seems to be their greatest asset at election time, making the rounds in the pulpits on Sunday mornings... wait a minute, may be we do need to separate church and state.

Tags: Church , Separation of Church and State