Michael Flynn, in a recent Awaken America speech, declared, “If we are going to have one nation under God … we have to have one religion.” Flynn’s notion runs contrary to several Founding Fathers’ statements on religion in America based on Old World evils of religion and government connected in support of one faith or another in exclusion of other beliefs.
Read James Madison’s 15-point Memorial and Remonstrance, particularly Point 3: “Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other sects?”
John Adams, in his Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, wrote of the European religious wars wherein the canon and feudal law, church and state, were united: “the struggle between the people and the confederacy aforesaid of temporal and spiritual tyranny, became formidable, violent, and bloody. It was this great struggle that peopled America. It was not religion alone, as is commonly supposed, but it was a love of universal liberty, and a hatred, a dread, a horror, of the infernal confederacy…that projected, conducted, and accomplished the settlement of America.”
Finally, other constitutional Founders and ratifiers chose to include within the Constitution Article VI, Clause 3, a protection of personal beliefs and faiths for all state, federal, legislative, judicial and executive office holders: “No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.”
Flynn is proposing an overthrow of 1787!
Bruce Braden
Carmel, Ind.
The writer is a Mt. Pleasant native.