Some people should not cite history

When I was in the seventh grade in Holy Rosary Catholic School in Bozeman (and that was a long time ago), history was the final period of the day. However, several times a week we had a young priest come in to talk to us about the evils of the world and the majesty of the Catholic Church. Invariably he would talk for two periods instead of one; the young nun couldn't cut him off and we didn't do history that day. I suspect that gave me a jaundiced view of priests that was just enhanced by later experiences. But I loved history. In high school, I always did well in that class and spent at least one summer reading the Bible, all of Shakespeare and a condensed, one-volume encyclopedia of history that my mother had gotten from the Book of the Month Club. Before I entered college I knew that most of the names we think of when we cite the Founding Fathers were not religious people. They were products of the Enlightenment, that time in the world when we began to realize that there were natural systems that held the universe together. If they were not deists who felt that if there was a god he had wound up the world and wandered away behind the veil (as the Bible says) or they were Georgian Church of England which was more of a social event than fundamental Christianity. Indeed Methodists, Friends and I suspect Congregationalists and Presbyterians all owe their birth to this attitude. None of our founding fathers, as far I have read, belonged to any of those sects then considered as weird as holy rollers would be later. Since then there have been tepid references to religion in our political lives, mostly when a leader says he has prayed for guidance, but nothing that indicates a belief in establishing a religion or forcing people to accept policy because one church says it is against "natural" law, which I say does not exist except in a majority, but not in a universal situation. I am reminded of a few years ago when the Gazette ran a picture of a recreation of an old-time one-room school house from the late 1800s. On the blackboard was the Pledge of Allegiance. And, of course, someone wrote in that the phrase "under god" (one of the most inane editorial changes ever made was omitted. They did not know history enough to know that the pledge was not changed to include that phrase until 1954 under the sainted President Eisenhower (for whom I cast my first vote) in the wake of the unsainted joseph mccarthy (lower case deliberate) who seems to me the model for the new fundamentalists. It always amazed me that the French and the English could pray during the hundred years war to the same god for victory and now we were doing it. It gave us an arrogance during the Cold War, I guess, a certainty that we were the chosen ones. And now, I understand, we have a unstable justice on the Supreme Court (Thomas) who actually thinks that states should be allowed under the Constitution to establish religions. Apparently he says this should be a state's right. I thought we settled all that business of states rights in 1864. At least the Supreme Court went on record some years ago as saying that the Bill of Rights pertained to the states. Thank "God"!