From Deseret News archives:
First Amendment protects, doesn't bar, religion
Our reader is making a mistake, common at least since the 1960s, that because the First Amendment prohibits state-sponsored churches and protects religions from government interference that there can or should be no discussion of religion in the public square. The framers of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were deeply concerned that state-supported churches and laws requiring certain types of belief in God would give religions the power of the state to enforce particular doctrines. Undergirding the framers' thinking is a strong commitment to a religiously pluralistic society in which all ideas, including religious ideas, compete in the marketplace.
Far from wishing to exclude religion from the public square, the Founders had a deep understanding that not giving government sanction to a particular church would lead to religious diversity which would strengthen the religious impulse of the citizenry. George Washington understood this, and, speaking for many of his colleagues, said that "of all the dispositions and habits, which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports." Paul Johnson in his exhaustive "A History of the American People," (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1997) concluded that "America had been founded primarily for religious purposes, and the Great Awakening had been the original dynamic of the continental movement for independence."
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