I agree Don. One problem with our education system is that we don't teach the lineages of particular philosophical movements, hence the confusion we are seeing today in so many of the issues being debated in this presidential election.

Back in the thread I started in May, I also linked to an interview with Susan Jacoby at beliefnet, that I'd like to quote to give some even more specific context to this thread. Here are her responses to three questions I think it is important to consider here:

Beliefnet: What do you mean when you say the orthodox religious view?

Jacoby: I stress the orthodox or right wing religious view because I don't like it when people talk about religion versus secularism. What they really mean is a particular kind of religion versus secularism. The general press has a tendency to say religious as if all religions were alike and all religious believers had the same beliefs.

Beliefnet: What are the main battles ahead between secularists and the religious right?

Jacoby: First of all, I believe that this election is a battle between these groups. The religious right has a champion who is the president of the United States. This election is a battle about many things, but one of those things is between a secular view of public affairs, between people who believe in the separation of church and state, as secularists and freethinkers do, and people who don't. And the religious right does not believe in separation of church and state really. What they believe in is that their religious principles are the ones that ought to dominate government policy.

There are so many other issues. Will we depart from American tradition and provide tax support in the form of vouchers, for religious schools? Will we drain off support from public schools and provide support for schools operated by everyone from the Christian right to ultra-Orthodox Jews? Number two, will we push for laws to regulate people's private lives, such as gay marriage laws, in ways that are in accordance with the principles of the Christian right? Will we appoint judges--which is, I think, arguably the most important issue in this election--who don't believe that there should be any separation of church and state?

One of the more astonishing and dismaying public statements ever made was made by Antonin Scalia several years ago in an address about capital punishment to the University of Chicago Divinity School, which received very little publicity at the time, in which he said that God has the power of life and death and therefore governments, who derive their power from God, have the right to dispense life and death too. This is a horrifying thought. The idea of having judges who look to God for instructions in their decisions, not to "we the people," as our secular constitution says, it's a terrible idea. When you look to God for instruction, well everybody's God says something different to him. We can't decide government policy on the basis of people who think they have a pipeline to God.

Beliefnet: Let's turn to the history of secularism. How does this history fit into American religious history?

Jacoby: The secularist strain in American culture has been very strong since the beginning, but the nation's secular heritage is virtually unknown to people. A secular government was developed to protect the rights of religious minorities. Most Americans don't know that God is not mentioned in the Constitution. It was a coalition of religious Evangelicals and freethinkers or deists who joined together to get this ratified. And why did the Evangelicals want this then? Because they were a minority and they deeply feared government interference with religion. This Constitution basically placed the Episcopal Church, the established religion in the South before the Revolution, on a level playing field with all of the Evangelical Protestant denominations that were sprouting up. The effect of this was to enable them to proselytize for their own religion in ways that if there had been a union of established church and state they never would have been able to do. Ironically, it's the separation of church and state that has probably enabled religion to flourish throughout the 20th century in this country in ways that it doesn't in other developed nations.

The history of secularism is also the history of a certain kind of religion. One of the interesting things that happened in this country is, between roughly 1780 and 1825 in New England, more than half of all of the once orthodox Calvinist churches transformed into the much more liberal, Unitarian churches, a development the orthodox of the day hated as much as the religious right hates secularists today. In fact, they referred to Unitarians as infidels and atheists. But those people led to a transformation of American religion. They were influenced by freethought and freethinkers were influenced by them. And later on when evolution came along, this part of American Protestantism accommodated itself to evolutionism, as it had accommodated itself to Enlightenment thought in the 18th century.