Birthdays typically prompt us to look back on our lives and take stock of how far we have come, where we stand, and what we would like to do with the time we have left.  As the 249th birthday of our nation approaches, Americans would do well to do the same, remembering the rich religious heritage and ideals upon which our nation was founded and considering how our future might be shaped if that heritage is revived — or forgotten.

President Donald Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again,” has become more than an applause line in a stump speech.  It has become a political movement and policy agenda.  But making that meme an enduring reality requires a deep understanding of and commitment to what made our nation great in the first place.

Many pundits, media personalities, preachers, and politicians now espouse the dangerously misguided view that religious pluralism equates to relativism...and therefore subjective morality and public policy are incompatible.  This approach is not only constitutionally apocryphal, but biblically illiterate — and, frankly, the source of many of our nation’s troubles.  Too many of our fellow citizens have forgotten the foundational idea of our republic, which was informed by faith and the belief that men must be good to be free.

Our Founders understood that freedom and morality are inextricably linked.  If you have freedom but no morality, and each man is free to do what is right in his own eyes, the strong will inevitably oppress the weak.  The rich will take advantage of the poor.  The well connected will use their advantage over the powerless.  The governing will play by an entirely different set of rules from the governed.  The proper role of religion in a free, civil society is to restrain the fallen nature of man.

Three common misconceptions have contributed to many Americans’ rejection of our religious heritage and the role of religion in a free society: Thomas Jefferson’s “wall of separation between church and state,” our “Godless Constitution,” and the folly of “legislating morality.”

Jefferson’s Wall

The perception of a wall of separation between church and state comes from a phrase in a letter President Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1802 to the Danbury Baptist Association of Connecticut.  In answering their concerns that a state-sponsored church would infringe upon their religious liberty, he wrote, “Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with solemn reverence that act of the whole American people which declared their legislature........

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