From Deseret News archives:
Founding Fathers' religious intent refereed
Author strives for 'book of history, not polemic'
Now, into the fray like a kindly recess monitor comes Forrest Church and his book, "So Help Me God: The Founding Fathers and the First Great Battle Over Church and State." Church (the man, not the institution) is a religious historian and a minister of All Souls Church in Manhattan. He was in Salt Lake City earlier this week to speak at First Unitarian Church.
Church's conclusion: The religious right and secularists "are each 100 percent half right" about the Founding Fathers. In other words, some of the men who wrote the U.S. Constitution and ran the fledgling country were practicing Christians, and some of those Christians wanted a state religion, or at least a government founded on religion. Others wanted to make sure government and religion were two distinct entities, neither influencing the other. And the two sides duked it out from day one.
His goal, he said in an interview this week, was "a book of history, not a polemic."
The tension between Christians and secularists in the years between George Washington's inaugural and the aftermath of the War of 1812 was fierce, he writes; the first great culture war in American political history, "a vigorous, sometimes savage, yet nearly forgotten 30-year conflict to redeem the nation's soul." The vitriol expressed by both sides was enough to make a modern-day talk-show host blush, he says.
And the roles of the players were not what you might suspect.
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