Sparks: The US founders’ other revolutionary choice: Separating religion and government

The claim is that the state is secular because it excludes the sacred, yet this very exclusion defines the sacred as a separate entity, proving that neither the state nor the church possesses an independent, self-standing nature.

This surgical removal of the priest from the palace is no triumph of reason, but rather the cleverest instinct of a new herd seeking to protect its private superstitions from the cold light of public responsibility.

Men build a wall between their laws and their God to quiet the terror of the infinite, yet they only succeed in creating a vacuum where neither the magistrate nor the mystic can find a firm footing.

There is a gate across this road called secularism, and before we congratulate ourselves on the view, we must ask if the founders built it to keep the church out of politics or to keep politics out of the church.

Demonstrative truth and revealed law appear to conflict only when the magistrate confuses the rhetorical needs of the many with the syllogistic proofs of the few, necessitating a jurisdictional peace that preserves the dignity of both.

Visions of justice wither when the sap of the eternal is diverted from the trunk of the city, for even the sturdiest wall cannot prevent the roots of the soul from seeking the living green of their origin.

By dividing the spiritual from the temporal, the general of statecraft denies his internal enemies a singular high ground, ensuring that no single banner can ever rally the entire valley against his command.

How long shall we ignore that a republic stripped of its ancestral pieties risks becoming a mere contract of convenience, where the law lacks the solemnity required to command the heart as well as the hand?

You imagine that by severing the state from the altar you have liberated man, but you have only left him alone in the dark with his own bottomless vanity and the terrifying freedom to invent his own gods.

If the universe is infinite and every sun a center, then any earthly wall built to contain the spirit is a laughable pretense that reveals only the smallness of the minds who fear the plurality of worlds.

The announcement concerns a fine line between the pulpit and the law, but my back still bears the stripes of a system that used the Bible to justify the chains that the state refused to break.

It was decided that the Creator should be officially invited to every public function but strictly forbidden from influencing the catering or the legislation, a compromise that everyone found perfectly sensible and entirely unworkable.

A country with one religion produces despotism, one with two produces civil war, but these Americans have discovered that a hundred religions produce only a very peaceful and profitable afternoon at the market.

It is a most efficient arrangement to let citizens worship as they please, as it ensures they are too busy arguing over the geography of the next world to notice who is pocketing the taxes in this one.

When the crown and the miter are worn by the same head, the conscience of the individual has no refuge; the American ruin of this ancient alliance is the only foundation for true liberty.

Observing the frontier settlements, I find a chaotic variety of steeples rising alongside the courthouses, suggesting that when the law stops choosing a path for the soul, the people find a dozen paths of their own.