"Unto Caesar"
The article's a bit longish, so I'll just post some excerpts.
Emphasis mine.Rhode Island soon established a reputation as a haven for religious dissenters. The feminist heretic Anne Hutchinson and her Antinomian associates (who criticized the Puritans for accepting moral behavior as evidence of God’s grace), Jews, Baptists, and Quakers — “all the scum and the runaways of the country,” in the words of the Massachusetts magistrates — found refuge there. In such a pluralistic environment, Williams determined that the only morally acceptable standard for statutory law is reason. People interpret God in many ways, he observed, but the demands of reason are the same for everyone.
Although Williams and Jefferson agreed on the necessity of maintaining as much neutrality between religion and politics as possible, their motivations differed. The pious Williams expressed concern about the dangers posed by government to religion. Jefferson, never an especially religious person, worried about the dangers posed by religion to government. His primary fear was that a religion representing a majority of Americans would gain control of government and use its political power to deprive religious minorities and disbelievers of their freedom to worship or not as they pleased.
The influence of evangelical Protestantism on Bush is so pervasive, concludes Kevin Phillips in American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century (2006), that the GOP has become “America’s first religious party.”
The source of this unprecedented cooperation among evangelicals, Catholics, and Republicans, [Damon] Linker explains, is their mutual hatred of abortion and mutual contempt for President Clinton’s sexual misadventures in the White House.
The theocon position is based on the historically inaccurate assumption that this country was founded as a Christian nation by devout Christians holding sound theological principles. Christian precepts, such as the fundamental equality of human beings and the dignity of the individual, contributed greatly to the creation of the American political system. But the Founding Fathers acknowledged other contributions as well — including the political philosophies of Aristotle, John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and the Baron de Montesquieu.
Moreover, unlike Roger Williams, whose beliefs had their roots in Augustinian theology, the Founding Fathers held what were at best superficial interpretations of Christianity. In concert with Enlightenment standards for religion, they considered reason more important than faith, tended to deny the divinity of Christ, and doubted the redemptive power of revelation. Jefferson famously wrote a version of the Bible that excluded miracles. These important differences notwithstanding, the Founding Fathers joined Williams in recognizing separation of church and state as a prerequisite for religious freedom.
