They knew that to put God in the constitution was to put man out. They knew that the recognition of a Deity would be seized upon by fanatics and zealots as a pretext for destroying the liberty of thought. They knew the terrible history of the church too well to place in her keeping or in the keeping of her God the sacred rights of man. They intended that all should have the right to worship or not to worship that our laws should make no distinction on account of creed. They intended to found and frame a government for man and for man alone. They wished to preserve the individuality of all to prevent the few from governing the many and the many from persecuting and destroying the few.Robert G. Ingersoll
About This Quote
The desire to preserve the rights of man and to make all citizens equal under the law is a noble and admirable aspiration. Such concerns lay at the very core of the concerns of the Founding Fathers. However, their concern was not for religious reason; it was for reasons that go beyond religion. When Thomas Jefferson wrote to Samuel Adams in 1788 about his proposed Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom, Jefferson put it like this: “I consider the government of the United States as interdicted by [the] Constitution from intermeddling in religious questions.” It was a very powerful statement, and one that speaks to a larger theme of this collection: Our Founders were not afraid to distinguish between church and state in a way that would have been anathema in their time. Theirs was a secular approach to government that assumed no religious role for government.
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