Thank you for inviting me to this event celebrating the 100th anniversary of the French constitutional provisions mandating the separation of church and state.

In 1787, Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to his nephew Peter Carr. Jefferson never had a son of his own, and his nephew often played that role. In this letter, written while Jefferson was living in France, Jefferson offered advice for a young man just beginning to make his way in the world. He discussed the intellectual and cultural attainments such a young man should strive for.

In the section dealing with religion, Jefferson wrote, “Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear. It is with great shame that I tell you today that any politician who said something like that today in my country could not be elected to public office. Note that Jefferson did not advise his nephew to stop believing in God – merely to have the courage to doubt. That would be enough to sink his political career today.

It is ironic that I am here at a time when the wall of separation of church and state in America is under sustained and relentless assault.

Those of us who defend church-state separation in America face serious challenges. In recent years, our political system has become dominated by political forces hostile to this basic constitutional principle. President George W. Bush was returned to office last November in part due to religious conservatives, and now they wish to see the church-state wall lowered dramatically or done away with altogether.

We face several major challenges:

* Faith-Based Initiatives: Religion in America has traditionally been funded with voluntary contributions. Bush wants to change that and allocate as much as $2 billion in taxpayer funds to religious organizations. Under this theory, the religious groups would provide various social services such as counseling for those wrestling with drug and alcohol addiction, job training, aid to the homeless and so on.

The problem is, there would be no protections for those in need to shield them from unwanted religious coercion. In other words, there would be nothing to prevent fundamentalist churches from pressuring the needy to take part in religious worship before receiving any aid.

In addition, religious groups want access to the public treasury but also seek to retain the right to hire only their own fellow believers. Jobs could be funded by the state but restricted to certain types of Christians.

* Creationism/Intelligent Design: We face constant attempts to remove the teaching of evolution from our public schools. I am embarrassed to stand here today and tell you that, according to some polls, nearly half of all Americans doubt the theory of evolution.

Some Americans believe that the Earth is only 6,000 years old and that dinosaurs and humans lived at the same time. There is an old cartoon called “The Flintstones” in which this was the case, but modern science tells a different story. Nevertheless, these attacks against science go on, and since most public schools in America are subjected to local control, many young people learn very little about evolution.

* Privacy rights/abortion/human sexuality: The Religious Right wants to control our lives from the moment of conception until the time of death – and they want the right to determine the latter. They intervene in the private matters of adults and launch crude attacks against gay Americans. They seek to ban all abortion and restrict certain forms of birth control. Even the most intimate details of our personal lives are fair game for Religious Right control.

At the same time, thanks to Religious Right pressure, American teenagers learn next to nothing about sex education in many schools. They are not taught about condoms or other methods of artificial birth control. As a result, the United States has one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the Western world.

* Public education and libraries: Fundamentalist Christians seek to turn our public schools into vehicles for the promotion of conservative Christianity. Ninety percent of American children attend public schools, reflecting a variety of religious and philosophical backgrounds. Given this diversity, it is essential that our schools remain neutral on questions of theology. The Religious Right seeks to upset this neutrality.

Our libraries are also under attack. Fundamentalists seek to remove certain books or restrict access, often under the claim of “protecting” children. They behave as if parents are not capable of determining which books are appropriate for their own children.

* Symbolic union of church and state: Recently, our Supreme Court ruled that government buildings may, under certain conditions, display the Ten Commandments. Attempts are being made to put the Ten Commandments up in courthouses, sending the message that American law has a religious basis.

The claim is made that the Ten Commandments are the foundation of American law, when this is plainly not the case. In fact, there are no laws against worshipping idols, committing blasphemy, coveting your neighbor’s goods or failing to honor your parents.

* Make-up of the federal courts: We have just learned that Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor is retiring, which will dramatically affect the balance on the court. Aside from this, we have seen determined efforts by Bush to stack the courts with opponents of church-state separation. These judges reject the views of Jefferson and James Madison, insisting that religion and government should be brought into a closer relationship.

It seems we are losing sight of some important principles: that no one should be forced to support religion against his or her will and that religion does best absent government’s efforts to help it.

Perhaps our American experiment has worked too well. We have lived so long without the threat of established religion that now some no longer see the threat in bringing church and state closer together.

But our founders knew why that was a problem. If you read the writings of men like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison today, they seem obsessed with the European experience. They had good reason to be. Church and state had worked in partnership there for so long, and the result had been oppression and tyranny.

In 1785, Patrick Henry made a proposal in Virginia to tax citizens for the support of ministers of the Christian religion. Henry probably thought he was exercising benevolent foresight. After all, allowing people to choose which version of Christianity they will support is better than forcing them to support one version, right?

Not to James Madison. Madison knew why Henry’s proposal was wrong. And to stop it, he penned one of the great documents in the history of religious freedom: The Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments.

This document is essentially a list of 15 reasons why people should not be forced to support religion against their will. In number 7, Madison writes: “Because experience witnesseth that ecclesiastical establishments, instead of maintaining the purity and efficacy of Religion, have had a contrary operation. During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.” In America, some people like to rewrite history. They have attempted to twist Madison’s words to portray him as weak in his support for separation of church and state. This is absurd. Madison’s support for church-state separation was stronger even than Jefferson’s. As the primary author of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, Madison speaks with authority when he comments on separation of church and state. Madison supported separation of church and state in part due to his experiences. As a young man living in Virginia, he in 1774 saw several men languishing in jail because they were Baptists who had dared to preach their doctrines on the street. This was illegal in the officially Anglican colony.

Madison was incensed. He was especially angry that some ministers worked with the state to strip away the religious freedom rights of others. He wrote, “That diabolical, hell-conceived principle of persecution rages among some and to their eternal infamy the clergy can furnish their quota of imps for such business. This vexes me the worst of anything whatever.”

As president, Madison was presented with two bills that he believed violated separation of church and state. One would have given federal land to a church, the other would have given an official government incorporation to a church. Madison vetoed them both, telling Congress that the measures violated the First Amendment.

Late in his life, when he was in retirement, Madison wrote a serious of essays that touched on church-state separation. In these essays he opposed military chaplains and presidential proclamation for days of prayer. Madison noted that as president, he issued such proclamations during the War of 1812 but said he had been careful to make them “absolutely indiscriminate and merely recommendatory.”

In those same essays, Madison wrote, “Strongly guarded is the separation between Religion and Government in the Constitution of the United States.”

We learned, through bitter experience, why church and state should be combined. We lived through a Puritan theocracy in Massachusetts, witch trials in Salem, established churches in the colonies and a great degree of inter-faith strife.

The separation of church and state ended all of that, and Madison led the way. Today there are those who would destroy his handiwork. A prominent television preacher, Pat Robertson, has called the separation of church and state a “lie of the left” and an invention of the Communists. Even the chief justice of our Supreme Court, William H. Rehnquist, has written that the wall of separation between church and state “is a metaphor based on bad history” and called for it to be “frankly and explicitly abandoned.”

So you see, our challenges are many. Yet I believe we will ultimately prevail. This is not to say we won’t have to go through a dark period first. We will. Yet we must continue this fight, if not for our own generation than for the next and the one that comes after that.

There are some positive signs. In a recent poll, two-thirds of all Americans said they believe religious leaders have too much influence over the government. Other polls show that the number of Americans who express skepticism over organized religion and identify themselves as non-theistic is growing, slowly but surely.

Americans are a religious people, but at the same time, they resist heavy-handed clerical interference in their private lives. Some of you might have read about the case of Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged Florida woman whose husband had to fight both church and state for the right to remove her feeding tube and allow her to die.

Many Americans reacted badly to the intervention by outside religious groups in what should have been a private family matter. Many Americans have been through the experience of seeing a loved one die a slow death or can imagine ending up like this themselves. They resented the Religious Right’s meddling in that case.

America is in for some rough years. We will be forced to fight old battles all over again. We may be often on the defensive. Yet I believe in the end we will win, and our system of separation of church and state will prevail. Why will we win? Because we are right. Our system works. We are right. And sometimes – sometimes – that is enough.

Thank you.