Let government stay out of religion

The United States was established by people who considered religion central to their lives.
Although the early population was made up mostly of Christians, there were already so many varieties of the religion that the settlers had to struggle over how to accommodate all of them in the emerging body politic.
Freedom of religion finally won out and was built into the Constitution and its amendments.
Today America is 40-plus years into a significant and continuing shift in the country's religious landscape that began with the adoption of immigration reform in 1965. On the whole, America is handling those changes reasonably well.
But we also see evidence that the increasing mix of religions is not sitting well with some people. In their angst, they are trying to turn their backs on principles deeply embedded in our national founding documents.
The recent fight over a pro-Christian resolution in the Missouri General Assembly is but one example of the difficulty some people are having adjusting to the reality that today they are quite likely to have as neighbors not just Christians and Jews but also Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Zoroastrians or adherents of other (and sometimes no) faiths.
In the beginning America was a landslide for Protestantism, mostly of the variety shaped by Puritanism. After much struggle for acceptance, Catholics eventually found their place in the culture. Today, in fact, five of the nine justices on the U.S. Supreme Court are Catholic.
The Protestant representation in the general population now has shrunk so much that experts say it either already has slipped below 50 percent or it soon will. And the flood of immigrants -- especially from Asia and the Southern Hemisphere -- arriving since 1965 has brought millions of adherents of non-Christian religions as well as many more expressions of Christianity, from Lao Baptists to Korean Presbyterians to Mexican Catholics.
Apparently people insecure about their place in society and unwilling to adapt to the new religious landscape find this threatening. They seem to want to return to a time (which never existed) when everyone went to church at 11 a.m. on Sunday and, almost in national unison, sang "Jesus Loves Me."
As someone who usually is in church at that time on Sundays and who loves that song, I also find myself at least at first attracted to the idea that such a shared national experience wouldn't be a bad thing.
Religiously diverse culture
But that's never going to happen. And the sooner we get on with the task of learning how to live in harmony in a religiously diverse culture, the better off we'll be and the more we can be a model for other nations struggling with questions of religious freedom.
The Missouri resolution was dangerous, even if remarkably silly. Its view of history ("our forefathers of this great nation of the United States recognized a Christian God") was inaccurate in that it was far too broadly stated.
Its clear purpose -- because as a resolution it had no enforcement authority -- was simply to placate some Christians who have reacted in fear to our changing religious demographics.
There certainly are worrisome examples of public officials and private leaders who want to limit public expression of religion and, in effect, silence the religious voice in the public square. And there is work to be done to counter such bigotry and hostility.
But when legislators even think about adopting pro-Christian resolutions in response to cultural changes they see around them, they have confused their roles. They are to adopt fair, constitutional laws and to lead by moral example. They are not to put on their pastoral collars and teach us their catechism.
They need only look at Europe to see the results of state-sponsored religion. Many state churches from England to France to Germany to Sweden are withering on the vine.
Government sanction of religion almost inevitably sucks the life out of faith.
People of faith who really care about the health and spread of their religion should be working hard to keep the government out of it, except as a guarantor of religious freedom. Government should worry about public education, roads, civil rights and on and on. We people of faith will worry about religion.
Bill Tammeus is a columnist for The Kansas City Star. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.