Reagan, the believer--Another reason for the left to hate him.

My nephew sent me the text of remarks made by President Reagan at an Ecumenical Prayer Breakfast in Dallas, Texas on August 23, 1984 containing this:

We establish no religion in this country, nor will we ever. We command no worship. We mandate no belief. But we poison our society when we remove its theological underpinnings. We court corruption when we leave it bereft of belief. All are free to believe or not believe; all are free to practice a faith or not. But those who believe must be free to speak of and act on their belief, to apply moral teaching to public questions.

I submit to you that the tolerant society is open to and encouraging of all religions. And this does not weaken us; it strengthens us, it makes us strong. You know, if we look back through history to all those great civilizations, those great nations that rose up to even world dominance and then deteriorated, declined, and fell, we find they all had one thing in common. One of the significant forerunners of their fall was their turning away from their God or gods.

Without God, there is no virtue, because there's no prompting of the conscience. Without God, we're mired in the material, that flat world that tells us only what the senses perceive. Without God, there is a coarsening of the society. And without God, democracy will not and cannot long endure. If we ever forget that we're one nation under God, then we will be a nation gone under.

The central point is tolerance. That is what the First Amendment stands for with its two clauses, one forbidding an establishment and the other prohibiting interference with the free exercise of religion. This was not a "wall of separation" as it has been interpreted by courts who portray religion as some kind of predatory influence that makes people feel stigmatized who don't believe. This view, rather than promoting tolerance, has resulted in a hair trigger society where the least hint of religious faith in a public setting sets off the threat of lawsuits.

I think that the founding fathers were no wimps. They didn't feel sorry for themselves and would have despised whiners who think that the constitution was meant to protect our delicate psyches from feeling stigmatized. Nobody protected me from feeling stigmatized when I was the only Mormon kid in my grade school. It never occurred to me to complain about the songs we sang in school. What I learned in a pluralistic setting was respect for religion as a civilizing influence in society. Today it is seen as a source of division, only because the courts have made it so. If you want to understand the effect of the "wall of separation" doctrine, look at how much tolerance you feel both from religions other than your own or how tolerant you perceive them to be of you. The distrust and resentment has come from atheists, those who could not be content to say they do not believe in God but realize that it is impossible to disprove his existence. They are positive that belief in God harms society and demand that their views be given pre-eminence in public settings. The courts have agreed and thus made atheism the de facto state religion, the opposite of the tolerance intended by the founders. It was certainly true that there were all kinds of prejudice in the 18th Century between Puritans, Anglican and other protestants, Catholics, and Jews. That's why so many intellectuals were deists; it allowed them to believe but not be involved in the disputes among the sects. They were also aware that many groups had come here to escape religious persecution and to be free to worship according to their own beliefs. Is it really believable that they would approve giving so much veto power to atheists?