Dear Editor:
In response to the Supreme Court’s argument on religious public schools, April 30: To students of Colonial American history and the Bill of Rights, this is a potential big deal and worthy of attention.
Colonial Baptists, Quakers, Presbyterians and others were victimized by intemperate application of arrests, fines, public beatings, tar-and-feathering and, in at least one case in Boston, hanging, of strict religionists in colonies like Massachusetts Bay and Virginia. The Puritans and the Pilgrims stood at odds and in conflict.
The tiny colony of Rhode Island was founded by a Baptist Christian who had been banished by Puritans for his beliefs — in winter to a sure death had he not been rescued by the Wampanoag people. The Rhode Island colony went on to be a refuge — like Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York — and home to the first Jewish congregation in America.
Freedom of religion was enshrined in the Bill of Rights to protect the ability of all people to worship as they believed, protected from persecution, especially that which comes from fundamentalist religion welded by the power of the state.
In my home state of Louisiana, Baptists used to stand up to be counted against the use of public funds for private education because Baptist Christians are a minority in a state where the majority religion of much of the state is Roman Catholic.
Baptists, then, feared a “slippery slope” toward preferential treatment toward another religion.
Thankfully, the Baptists and the Roman Catholics tend to get along much better today, yet many who don’t know, appreciate or are antagonistic toward history have reversed their position toward state-sponsored religion. The wise, though, know human beings tend to bend toward wielding power parochially; that some of our 50 states have majority religions much different from the fundamentalist Christianity found in the American South and Southwest; and when religion and state have combined over the centuries, religion always loses and is used by the powerful as ways to control and subjugate the people.
True faith and conversion are works of God in the hearts and minds of human beings who must be free to say yes or no. Coercion never made for a good marriage or healthy faith. The Bill of Rights intends to set a level playing field. Where the level playing field has been breached or obstructed, it should be restored.
Whether a religious school is of the highest caliber and excellence of reputation or of censorious, segregationist intention, neither is worthy of establishment as “the” religion of a free and generous people.
Bob Guffey, Norfolk, Va.