Look again at the first amendment. What does it say? How does First Amendment justify forcing people to abandon their religious beliefs in public square? When the public square knows no bounds, where do our public lives leave off? Where do our private lives begin?

Is the education of children, for example, the private responsibly of parents or the public responsibility of government? Given the importance of teaching children the difference between right and wrong, isn’t the notion we should entirely secularize education absurd? If such a notion had been a precondition for the public school system, do you truly believe this system would now exist?

Yes, in 250 years change does occurs. Unfortunately, much change is horribly ill considered, and sometimes change must be undone.

Note that you may find this post relevant to our discussion.

Individual Founders may have had their individual opinions about the role of religion in government, but the blueprint for our government, the Constitution, quite deliberately only mentions religion twice — the First Amendment and the “No Religious Tests” Clause. In both cases, the Constitutional mention is to keep civil government out of the religion business, which is basically my second Websters definition of “secularist” quoted above. I completely agree that I don’t think that most of the Founders were anti-religious, as some have suggested (although many, such as Jefferson, Adams and Madison, were anti-clerical), but I do think that they created a Constitutional “Wall of Separation” between church and state, as Jefferson so famously wrote in hia Letter to the Danbury Babtists.

I don’t really think that we disagree on the concept — just the semantics, but if you like that they created “secular state” better than “secularist state,” I think we get to the same place 250 years later. The Constitution is what it is and purposely so — a non-religious document.

Look up the definition. A secularist advocates and supports secularism. While some people may want a secularist state, we do not yet have one. That is because the Founding Fathers established a secular government, not a secularist state. If the government they had founded had been a secularist government, the Founding Fathers would have set out to abolish religious practice. Clearly, that was never their intent.

As Washington’s Thanksgiving Proclamation indicates, the Founding Fathers did not intend that civil matters be conducted without a religious element.

Consider this quote.

I have sworn upon the alter of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. — Thomas Jefferson

What the Founding Fathers apparently intended is that the Federal Government would have no power to establish a state religion. That is a far cry from forcing religion out of the public square.

I think the reason the Founding Fathers did not put the word “God” in the Constitution is twofold. First, the men who wrote the Constitution understood that what they were doing would not be God’s work. So they wanted it clearly understood by one and all that the Constitution was man’s work. Second, to uphold each person’s right to maintain their own religious beliefs, they wanted it clearly understood that government had no power over the People’s religious beliefs.

What the Founding Fathers established was a secular state. They never intended to establish a secularist state. These two are very much different things.