9. Religious Liberty in Peril - Hal Meyer

“Quite a few years ago, U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist said, “The wall of separation between church and State is a metaphor based on bad history, a metaphor which has proved useless as a guide to judging. It should be frankly and explicitly abandoned.” This terrible statement reflects the desire of some, to allow the church to become involved in matters of state and manipulate the state to its own ends. The separation of church and state in the U.S. Constitution and other western constitutions was a direct result of the persecutions of the Roman Catholic Church in medieval times when it dominated religious and secular life of the European Holy Roman Empire. The Empire was anything but holy. Nevertheless, there are those today who do not want to acknowledge the abuses of the church during that time. Yet, that is the reason the founding fathers of the United States created the first amendment of the U.S. Constitution. They saw that religious liberty was the first liberty of all and from there all other liberties extend. They saw that they had to establish some kind of bulwark against the reconstruction of that same principle in the new world.