An excellent article on the rest of the Christians in America. Not all of us believe that it is possible to legislate morality. Not all of us believe that it is possible to codify the whole of the Christian life into law. I would even suggest that the moderate Christians are the silent, or at least less vocal, majority. I do not agree with everything Mr. Danforth puts forth in his article but I do agree wholeheartedly with the basic tenet that the Christian Right does not speak for or accurately represent the whole of the Christian church.
At the core of this issue for me is really freedom of religious belief. One of the issues that exemplifies this well is prayer in school. In my opinion, if we are to allow prayer in school and we are to respect the First Amendment to the United States Constitution then each school would need a schedule to ensure that every religion represented in the school population was represented in the school prayer. I suppose one way to do that would be to have one prayer for each religion everyday. I suspect, however, that would cut deeply into total teaching minutes for the day. Better might be to have a different religion pray each day. So, the school prayer schedule might look like this. Monday is Protestant Christian, Tuesday is Hindu, Wednesday is Buddhist, Thursday Muslim (everyone arriving in time for morning prayer), and Friday there is no prayer in recognition of the Atheists. Of course, it wouldn’t be long before an entire month was taken up just so that all the Christian denominations could have their say.
The point is, while our founding fathers may well have been Christians themselves they understood the importance of being free to believe according to one’s heart. Ensuring one’s own freedom to worship as they please or not at all is best guaranteed by ensuring that everyone has the freedom to worship as they please. As soon as we begin to exclude any religion we put at risk our own religion.
Aloha