THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, July 15, 1994 TAG: 9407150033
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A12 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Letter
LENGTH: Short : 44 lines
As I opened my newspaper on the Sunday before the greatest of all American holidays, I was greeted with the alarming news that most high-school and college students cannot write.
As I read the rest of the paper, it occurred to me that there was an even more alarming trend: Even more Americans do not know basic American history. I direct your attention to the many writers of letters to the editor who implore America to go back to the wisdom of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, et al., and return this country to its Christian roots.
They claim America has been subverted by not allowing prayer in school as our forefathers wanted. It's time for a reality check.
Our forefathers made the separation between church and state so that people would not have to pray in school, or elsewhere, if they did not want to do so.
Many of the ``Christian Right'' look to our country's founders as paragons of Christian strength. They were not. For the most part, these men were diests. A diest is someone who thinks a superior being made the world and now does nothing.
Diests wanted freedom of religion not so much because they wanted the freedom to worship; rather, they wanted the freedom not to worship. Not only did this free them from worship, it freed them from something even more horrible to a rich, white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant slaveholder (yes, that's what they were): They did not want poorer white males to vote, much less African-Americans and women. They did want to be taxed to support an established church. This being the case, why are the names of these men being cited and claiming this is what America is about?
Maybe in the light of patriotic celebrations, now is the time for Americans to rediscover what most of our forefathers believed when they came here: that America is a land of tolerance and acceptance - or at least should be.
J. L. WILLIAMS
Chesapeake, July 3, 1994 by CNB