Will religion be the next workplace issue?

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Topic:	Religions > Atheism
User:	"MrPepper11"
Date:	31 Oct 2004 06:06:09 PM
Object:	Will religion be the next workplace issue?

"When you apply for a loan, or walk into a grocery store, or take your
seat on an airplane, do you have a right to expect a secular
atmosphere, uncontaminated by religiosity? Or is the greater right
that of the company's owners to express their faith?"
New York Times Magazine
October 31, 2004
Faith at Work
By RUSSELL SHORTO

Across the Judean desert, over the opal waves of the Mediterranean,
along stone-paved roads that scored the plains of Syria and Asia Minor
and carried into the heart of Rome, the Word spread 20 centuries ago.
And as it did, it transmitted itself less in houses of worship than in
the tents of carpet sellers, in wine shops and bakeries and maybe most
of all at the tables found in every market town where stacks of coins
signaled the indispensable presence of the moneylender. The market was
the central place of human interaction. It was where change happened,
where ideas lighted from one mind to the next.
And so it remains. Chuck Ripka is a moneylender -- that is to say, a
mortgage banker -- and his institution, the Riverview Community Bank
in Otsego, Minn., is a way station for Christ. When he's not approving
mortgages, or rather especially when he is, Ripka lays his hands on
customers and colleagues, bows his head and prays: "Lord, I pray that
you will bring Matt and Jaimie the best buyer for their house so that
they have the money to purchase the new home they feel called to. And
I pray, Lord, that you grant me the wisdom to give them the best
advice to meet their financial needs."
The bank is F.D.I.C. approved. It has a drop ceiling and fluorescent
lighting. Current yield on a 30-year mortgage is 5.75 percent. The
view out Ripka's office window is of an Embers chain restaurant. Yet
for all the modern normalcy, the sensibility that permeates the place
comes straight out of the first century A.D., when Christianity was
not a churchbound institution but an ecstatic Jewish cult traveling
humanity's byways.
The bank opened 18 months ago as a "Christian financial institution,"
with a Bible buried in the foundation and the words "In God We Trust"
engraved in the cornerstone. In that time, deposits have jumped from
$5 million to more than $75 million. The phone rings; it's a woman
from Minneapolis who has $1.5 million in savings and wants to transfer
it here. "I heard about the Christian bank," she tells Ripka, "and I
said, 'That's where I want my money."' Because of people like her,
Riverview is one of the fastest growing start-up banks in the state,
and if you ask Ripka, who is a vice president, or his boss, the bank
president, Duane Kropuenske, whose office wall features a large color
print of two businessmen with Christ, or Gloria Oshima, a teller who
prays with customers at the drive-up window, all will explain the
bank's success in the same way. Jesus Christ has blessed them because
they are obedient to his will. Jesus told them to take his word out of
the church and bring it to where people interact: the marketplace.
Chuck Ripka says he sometimes slips and says to people, "Come on over
to the church -- I mean the bank." He's not literally a man of the
cloth, but in the parlance of the initiated, he is a marketplace
pastor, one node of a sprawling, vigorous faith-at-work movement. An
auto-parts manufacturer in downtown Philadelphia. An advertising
agency in Fort Lauderdale. An Ohio prison. A Colorado Springs dental
office. A career-counseling firm in Portland, Ore. The Curves chain of
fitness centers. American Express. Intel. The Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention. The I.R.S. The Pentagon. The White House.
Thousands of businesses and other entities, from one-man operations to
global corporations to divisions of the federal government, have made
room for Christianity on the job, and in some cases have oriented
themselves completely around Christian precepts. Well-established
Christian groups, including the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association
and the Promise Keepers, are putting money and support behind the
movement. There are faith-at-work newsletters and blogs and books with
titles like "God@Work," "Believers in Business" and "Loving Monday."
The idea is that Christians have for too long practiced their faith on
Sundays and left it behind during the workweek, that there is a moral
vacuum in the modern workplace, which leads to backstabbing careerism,
empty routines for employees and C.E.O.'s who push for profits at the
expense of society, the environment and their fellow human beings. No
less a figure than the Rev. Billy Graham has predicted that "one of
the next great moves of God is going to be through believers in the
workplace." To listen to marketplace pastors, you would think churches
were almost passe; for them work is the place, and Jesus is the
antidote to both cubicle boredom and Enron-style malfeasance.
Os Hillman, a former golf professional and advertising executive in
Georgia, is an unofficial leader of the movement. "We teach men and
women to see their work as not just where they collect a check, but
actually as their calling in life," he says. "We teach them to see
what the Bible says about work, to see the spiritual value of their
work." Through two organizations, the International Coalition of
Workplace Ministries and Marketplace Leaders, Hillman and his wife,
Angie, offer workshops, publish books and organize conferences. More
than 900 "workplace ministries" are listed in I.C.W.M.'s member
directory, and Hillman's faith-at-work e-mail devotional -- which
features stories noting that Jesus and the apostles all had jobs and
that most of the parables in the New Testament have workplace settings
-- goes out to 80,000 subscribers daily.
Of course, Christianity isn't the only spiritual force in the
workplace. There is an overarching faith-at-work movement afoot. Some
companies are paying for, or at least allowing, workplace meditation
sessions and Talmudic-study groups and shamanistic-healing retreats
for employees. But this remains an overwhelmingly Christian nation.
According to the Gallup polling organization (which itself fits into
the subject of this article, as George Gallup Jr. is an evangelical
Christian who has called his work "a kind of ministry"), 42 percent of
Americans consider themselves evangelical or born again, and the
aggressiveness with which some evangelicals are asserting their faith
on the job suggests that the movement's impact, for better or worse,
is going to come from them.
Most mainline Christian denominations have been slow to embrace the
movement. Church leaders either haven't recognized it as significant
or have determined that since it takes place outside the walls of
their institutions, it is by definition not of concern to them. But
some pastors are out in front of their leaders: they have left their
churches to become workplace-ministry consultants or have landed jobs
as "corporate chaplains," spiritual counselors hired by companies as a
perk for employees. Rich Marshall, who is now a consultant, was a
pastor in San Jose, Calif., for 25 years. "I realized what I was
preaching in my pulpit wasn't helping people in their work lives," he
says. "Now I'm on the road, speaking to businesspeople about
integrating faith and work."
Looked at in light of some recent trends, there is a certain logic in
all of this. First came the withering of the mainline Christian
denominations and the proliferation of new, breakaway churches. Then
consumerism took hold: today, many serious Christians are transient,
switching churches and theologies again and again to suit their
changing needs. With traditional institutions fragmenting and many
people both hungry for spiritual guidance and spending more time at
work than ever, it was perhaps inevitable that the job site would
become a kind of new church.
When it comes to writing about religion, objectivity is a false god.
In the interest of full disclosure, I would like to state here that my
own orientation is secular but that I also believe that all religions
have more or less equal dollops of spiritual truth in them, which
become corrupted by personal and cultural dross. This puts me at a
certain distance from most of the people in this article. For one
thing, all the marketplace Christians I encountered were firmly of the
belief that Christian truth is the only truth and that part of their
duty as Christians is to save the unsaved.
My task, then, was to try to understand a phenomenon that has, from my
perspective, an inherent conflict in it. One of the movement's
objectives is to give Christians an opportunity to "out" themselves on
the job, to let them express who they are, freely and without feeling
persecuted. Few would argue with such a goal: it suits an open
society. And if it increases productivity and keeps C.E.O.'s from
turning into reptiles, all the better.
Then again, the idea of corporations dominated by a particular
religious faith has a hint of oppressiveness, a "Taliban Inc." aspect.
As it is, Christian holidays are the only official religious holidays
in 99 percent of American workplaces surveyed by the Tanenbaum Center
for Interreligious Understanding. Religious-discrimination complaints
to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission have increased 84
percent since 1992 and 30 percent since 2000. Georgette Bennett, the
director of the Tanenbaum Center, attributes the rise in part to the
influx of workers from Asian and African countries and an overall
aging of the largely Christian homegrown workforce, leading to a clash
of traditions. "Added to that is the way in which religion has entered
the public square and been politicized," she says.
Some friction may come from the insistence of marketplace Christians
on seeing offices and factories as arenas for evangelism. Converting
others, after all, is what being an evangelical Christian is all
about. One tenet listed in the Riverview Community Bank's first annual
report is to "use the bank's Christian principles to expand
Christianity." If that wasn't clear enough, Ripka put it in even
starker terms for me: "We use the bank as a front to do full-time
ministry." Ken Beaudry, a marketplace pastor whose heating-oil company
is just down the road from the Riverview bank, takes the same view.
"It's all about understanding that your business has a cause," he
says. "It's about recognizing that we exist as a company not just to
make profits, but to change society. And our employees are on board
with that."
On-the-job evangelism extends far beyond Ripka's community. In 2001,
Angie Tracey, an employee at the Centers for Disease Control,
organized what she calls a "comprehensive workplace ministry," among
the first officially sanctioned employee religious groups within the
federal government. She says that many colleagues have been "saved" at
her group's Bible studies and other gatherings on government property,
and she describes the federal agency's not-yet-saved employees as
"fertile ground." Her program has spread rapidly within the C.D.C.,
and employees at other divisions of the federal government -- the
Census Bureau, the General Services Administration, the Office of
Personnel Management -- have contacted her about bringing the Word
into their workplaces, too.
To explore this movement, I felt I needed a guide. Of all the
marketplace pastors I spoke with, Ripka stood out at once in the
intensity of his faith, his commitment to using his workplace as a
vehicle for spreading it and his openness -- his purity, if you will.
There was also a modest personal connection between us: we are the
same age and both grew up Catholic. After several telephone
conversations, we made a kind of pact. He would welcome me into his
bank and his home and would open up to me his world so that I might
better understand why he and others think the faith-at-work movement
is part of the next phase of Christianity.
And what would Ripka get in return? "The Lord told me you would call,
Russell," he said in our first conversation. Through me, he would get
a chance to spread the Word.
So, the first thing to know about Chuck Ripka is that he says Jesus
talks to him -- actually speaks to him, calling him "Chuck." Ripka is
45, a father of five and grandfather of two who has been married to
his high-school sweetheart for 25 years. He has a compact build and
pinprick eyes; he talks in a soft, rapid monotone. He once fasted for
40 days and 40 nights, just as Jesus did in the wilderness. He says he
has performed more than 60 faith healings in the bank and has "saved"
another 60 people on bank premises. Knowing him at first only via
telephone, and listening to his talk of visions and voices and Satan
and ecstatic healings, I began to think of him as potentially
unbalanced. Yet on meeting him, I quickly discovered that he is a
pillar of his community. The mayor stopped by his office for a chat
while I was there. The chief of police and the superintendent of
schools see him for prayer. He occasionally gives spiritual counseling
to Carl Pohlad, the owner of the Minnesota Twins. Ripka runs a
quarterly faith-in-the-workplace lunch, which attracts up to 260 area
businesspeople. Many Christian business owners and residents say they
consider him to be not only a community leader and an expert in
small-business loans but also a conduit of the divine, a genuine holy
man.
Chuck and Kathi Ripka live in a beautiful log house on nearby Big
Lake. When I went there for dinner, their teenage son was playing a
video game in the semi-finished basement. Kathi served a nicely
prepared dish of chili, accompanied by Italian bread and salad. Since
we were all the same age and the two of them met in high school, we
talked about that era. Chuck told me how back then, before he found
Jesus, he was a longhaired kid who organized keg parties in the woods.
"Even then I had an anointing to bring people together," he said. "I
was just using it for the wrong purposes."
He worked odd jobs after high school and was born again when he was
21, during an Amway meeting. Shortly after, Jesus began talking to
him. "I used to assume that all Christians heard God the way I do," he
said. "But I realized over time that a lot of people don't hear, or
they don't recognize, his voice. They think, Are these my thoughts or
God's?"
Like many marketplace Christians, the Ripkas have an individualistic
theology. Though they currently belong to a Christian and Missionary
Alliance church -- an evangelical subdivision that holds, among other
things, that the second coming of Jesus Christ is imminent -- they
have changed churches often, and for periods of time have belonged to
no church. One of Chuck's refrains is that he's no theologian: he
can't rattle off scriptural citations to suit every situation. So
while quite a few people look to him as a spiritual leader, his own
faith is based not on a denomination's core doctrine so much as on
inner voices and convictions.
An individual reliance on the voice of God is part of the increasingly
free-form nature of charismatic and evangelical Christianity in
America. It jibes with the tradition's ultimate goal -- a personal
relationship with Jesus Christ -- but many evangelical leaders worry
that it's dangerously subjective. "Pat Robertson is the one who uses
it most: 'God told it to me,"' says Michael Cromartie, the director of
the Evangelicals in Civic Life program of the Ethics and Public Policy
Center, a conservative research center. "I think theologically that's
unfounded." Nonetheless, it seems fairly common among marketplace
pastors. Don Couchman, a dentist in Colorado who has made his dental
practice a workplace ministry, related a story not long ago about how
in the middle of performing a root canal, the Lord spoke to him and
told him to go on a pilgrimage to Argentina. I interrupted to ask how
he knew it was the Lord. "The sheep know the shepherd's voice," he
said. (Some workplace Bible-study groups, including those at the
Riverview bank, feature training in how to distinguish between God's
voice and random thoughts.)
Ripka had his marketplace epiphany 20 years ago when he was a salesman
at Levitz furniture in downtown St. Paul. "From out of the blue the
Lord said to me, 'Chuck, one day you're going to pray with a
customer,"' Ripka said. "Then several months later, I saw a man
standing in the store looking at beds, and the Lord said, 'This is the
one.' The man started to walk toward me, and I felt nervous and I
said, 'Lord, I need your help.' The gentleman started to talk to me,
and soon he was telling me he was divorced and his wife had custody of
their children. Then he said: 'Why am I telling you this? I came in to
buy a mattress.' I told him that three months before, the Lord told me
someone would come in and we would pray together. So we did. And then
something really important happened. The man bought a mattress. The
Lord said, 'Chuck, I wanted to show you how to talk to people about me
at work, and I wanted to prove to you that you would be able to do
that and prosper."'
It took some time, but when the Lord spoke next on the topic, he was
very specific. "The Lord told me in 2000 that Duane Kropuenske and I
were supposed to begin a new bank," Ripka said. Ripka worked for
Kropuenske and his wife, Patsy, at a bank in the 90's. When the couple
were considering opening a new one, they wanted to found it on
Christian principles. "One day Duane came to me and said, 'The Lord
told me I should talk to Chuck Ripka,"' Patsy Kropuenske says. When
her husband got in touch with Ripka, Ripka was already expecting the
call. Plans for Christianizing the bank expanded as they developed the
project, with the three principals believing more every day that they
were doing God's work.
As with all bankers, Ripka and the Kropuenskes care a lot about money,
but they see it as a token of God's favor rather than a thing in
itself. "The Lord spoke to me again on the day we opened," Ripka said.
"He told me: 'Chuck, if you do all the things I want you to do, I
promise I'll take care of the bottom line. I'm going to cause such a
rate of growth, the secular world is going to take notice.' And that
is happening."
One of the most striking things about the Riverview Community Bank is
its location. This isn't exactly the Bible Belt. We are 30 miles
northwest of Minneapolis, that bastion of Minnesota's secular-liberal
tradition. The adjoining communities of Otsego and Elk River lie on
either shore of a lazy bend in the Mississippi, a smaller mirror image
of the Twin Cities to the south. This is big-sky country, a landscape
of wide prairies and cornfield sunsets, but change is all around. Much
that was farmland just a few years ago is now bustling exurbia, where
brand-new Targets and OfficeMaxs and Applebees sit like boxy packages
on the horizon. Few residents commute to Minneapolis or St. Paul; few
seem even to venture there. They have their own culture, which is fast
evolving, and religion is part of the change. The Minnesota stereotype
of Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon -- the pinched, resourceful,
left-leaning Lutheran who eschews emotion -- is becoming less common.
There is more charismatic and evangelical expression in the state than
ever before.
"I was born and raised here, and of course we were Lutherans," Patsy
Kropuenske says. "Confessing your faith vocally -- that wasn't our
style. There's been a cultural change, and I feel it's something
that's needed, with the way the world is going today. With all the
terrorism and fear, people need guidance." She and her husband had
long been serious about their faith: Duane sends $50 a month to
support the televangelist Robert Schuller's "Hour of Power" program
and has a shelf of American eagle statuettes in his office to show for
it. But when Chuck and Kathi Ripka healed Patsy's debilitating back
pain in the bank the day before it opened -- laying their hands on her
and praying -- the healing demonstrated to her the kind of power
Christ would bring to the bank, and she became more open in her faith.
As you drive along Route 101, heading here from Minneapolis, the bank
is visible from three-quarters of a mile away: a massive temple-like
structure of red stone blocks. Step inside, and you are softly
assaulted by muted tones, wall-to-wall carpeting and curvilinear
faux-wood desks -- standard-issue bank decor. Spend some time, and you
begin to soak up an atmosphere of, well, peace. It is a very calm,
orderly place, governed by Christian principles from the ground up.
Many marketplace pastors say they try to be fair and aboveboard with
customers and competitors alike and will even refer business to a
competitor they know can do a better job of meeting a client's needs.
At the Riverview bank, Ripka says, they make a special point of
arranging loans for "ethnic" churches in the Twin Cities, which
typically have a hard time getting banks to approve them. And when
customers are behind on payments, he says, Riverview will "give more
grace" than the typical bank.
The atmosphere of calm extends to the bank's 42 employees, who seem
strikingly contented. Most are Christians, meaning not merely that
they were raised in a Christian household but that their faith is
overt. "I've been in the banking business for 15 years, but this is my
first Christian bank," says Shelly Nemerov, the operations officer,
and laughs. "I was a Christian before, but I didn't have a
relationship with God. Here, I've gone from saying I'm a Christian to
actually being a Christian." She handles returned checks and
overdrafts, and at some point, under the Riverview influence, she had
a Christian epiphany about her work: "You hear constant problems --
'I'm out of work,' 'My husband left me' -- and I used to think, Yeah,
I've heard it all before. Then it hit me: these people need help. So
now I say: 'What can I help you do? Can I teach you how to balance an
account or how to manage your money?' And I'll say, 'I think we should
pray over this."'
Praying with customers is one thing Riverview has become known for.
Gloria Oshima, a teller, was hired because of her previous experience
at the nearby First National Bank of Elk River, but her faith, which
she describes as "bold," was also apparent in the job interview. "When
Gloria came applying for a job, I had a vision of her praying with
customers," Ripka says. Referring to the bank's drive-up window,
Oshima says: "The Holy Spirit speaks to me when certain people drive
up. A young lady pulled up one day. I looked at her, and she had tears
in her eyes. I said: 'Are you O.K.? Would you mind if I prayed for
you?' She said O.K. I said, 'Inside the bank, or right here?' She
said, 'This is fine here.' So we prayed. I asked the Lord to remove
the hurts within her and bless her day. She came again later, into the
lobby this time, and she said, 'I'm doing so good, and I just wanted
to thank you for your prayers."'
Considering that many bank customers -- those seeking loans, say, or
involved in bankruptcy -- are at a vulnerable moment in their lives,
some may see this as preying on the weak. But the people at Riverview
say they are only doing their jobs -- their real jobs. They seem to
have realized that they are in a unique position not only to offer
comfort to people who are going through difficult times but also to
zoom in on lost souls. Nemerov says that none of the bankrupt or
overdrawn customers she has offered to pray with have ever said no,
and she is confident she knows why: "Their hearts are already broken
down and ready for it."
Well, all right, this is strange-sounding stuff. To someone unfamiliar
with marketplace Christianity, the questions pile up. Is this legal?
Aren't there separation-of-church-and-state issues here somewhere?
What about discrimination?
As it happens, thanks to the value American law places on religious
expression, proselytizing on the job is perfectly legal, even in a
government workplace, even when it's the boss who is doing the
pushing. If the legal aspects of the Christian-workplace phenomenon
seem bewildering, it may be because, while the United States has
always been a deeply religious nation, until recently it has also been
fairly resolute about keeping faith out of the public sphere. Thomas
Jefferson's famous metaphor of a wall of separation between church and
state has long been a part of the national psyche. The historical
reasons for erecting that wall are worth restating. The European
experience of the 16th and 17th centuries, the effects of which
carried over into the 18th, was of state-sponsored religious warfare,
of populations decimated and minorities oppressed in the name of one
branch of Christianity or another. Part of the genius and daring of
the framers of the American system was in their decision to break with
the European tradition of establishing a national church, in their
conviction that religion was too combustible a material to be fused
with political power.
You might think that recent religion-inspired violence would result in
a renewed conviction to keep religion out of the public sphere, yet
just the opposite has been happening. A major response in this country
to Islamic terrorism has been a rippling of Christian muscle. In the
post-9/11 universe, Christians have become more aggressive in pushing
a religious agenda on social issues ranging from gay marriage to
stem-cell research. "The whole war on terror has made evangelicals
more politically engaged," says Michael Cromartie of the Ethics and
Public Policy Center.
The workplace-ministry phenomenon, too, seems to have gained momentum
since 9/11, but it is also part of the broad trend that began in the
80's with the rise of the Moral Majority and continued at the national
political level with the emergence of the Christian Coalition. Many
workplace ministries have received legal advice from the
public-interest law firm the American Center for Law and Justice,
which was founded in 1990 by Pat Robertson "to undo the damage done by
almost a century of liberal thinking and activism." In 1990, there
were about 50 coalitions of workplace ministries, according to Os
Hillman's research; today there are thousands of businesses that, in
the words of yet another consortium of workplace ministries, the
American Chamber of Christians in Business, have "Jesus Christ as our
chairman of the board." And as with the Riverview Community Bank, they
aren't restricted to the Bible Belt. Rich Marshall, a
marketplace-ministry consultant and the author of "God@Work,"
crisscrosses the country giving seminars on the topic. The week I
spoke to him he was going to be in Los Angeles, El Paso and Rutland,
Vt. Two years ago, Don Thomas, a Christian business executive in San
Francisco, started looking for like-minded businesses in his famously
liberal area with whom his company might ally and says he received "an
overwhelming response." There are now 43 organizations in the Bay Area
Coalition of Workplace Ministries.
The laws governing religion in the workplace are technically fairly
clear, but in practice they can be nearly impossible to enforce. While
proselytizing is legal, what is forbidden is religious harassment, the
creation of a hostile work environment or using religion as a basis
for hiring, raises or promotions. Businesses like the Riverview
Community Bank are acutely aware of this. Ask Duane Kropuenske about a
Christian litmus test for employees, and he practically recites
chapter and verse from the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which laid down
the law on a wide variety of discrimination. "I have stressed when I
hire people that it's based on their qualifications, and we have no
intent to pressure them into any kind of religious experience," he
says. They might choose to join one of the bank's Bible-study groups
or pray with Chuck Ripka, but "it's not going to have any involvement
with their next raise or promotion or that type of thing."
When I asked Ripka if a Jew or Muslim had ever applied for a job at
the bank, his choice of language was a bit odd: "We don't really have
that in our community at this point." But his response highlights some
of the realities that govern many marketplace ministries. The
population of the Otsego-Elk River area is well over 90 percent white
and Christian, according to Stephanie Klinzing, the mayor of Elk River
(who is herself a charismatic Catholic and an enthusiastic supporter
of the bank and other Christian businesses in the community). Besides
that, why would a Jew or Muslim or Hindu apply for a job at a business
that is known throughout the area to be flamboyantly Christian? So
there is a certain self-selecting aspect to a business that wears its
faith on its sleeve.
Then, too, Ripka added that in its hiring the bank pays no mind to
employees' religious backgrounds, and for a reason quite beyond mere
legality. "It doesn't matter where they are in their walk," he said.
"In the job interview, I sit down and explain to them that we're doing
God's work at our bank. We don't say, 'You have to do this"' --
meaning become as devout as some in the bank are -- "but we say it's
something that will probably happen." What you are isn't important,
because they hope to make you into something new.
It doesn't always work. I spoke with one employee of the bank, who
asked that her name not be used, and she told me that while she had
been raised Catholic, she did not consider herself part of the bank's
Christian culture. "You will never find me going into Chuck's office
to pray," she said. On the other hand, she said that the bank was a
"wonderful" place to work because "here the people are all nice --
it's a healthy environment." Another employee, a young man who until
recently worked at a competing bank, also said that while he hasn't
given his soul to Jesus, he liked the wholesome atmosphere of
Riverview, and that the only downside was having to put up with his
former colleagues teasing him about his bosses making him say his
prayers before bed.
There's a matter of competing rights in all of this. When you apply
for a loan, or walk into a grocery store, or take your seat on an
airplane, do you have a right to expect a secular atmosphere,
uncontaminated by religiosity? Or is the greater right that of the
company's owners to express their faith? For a long time, Alaska
Airlines has included a prayer card with in-flight meals, a practice
that was instituted by a former executive. "It has received mixed
reviews, some people liking it and others writing to tell us they
don't appreciate it," a spokesman for the airline says. No one has
taken the airline to court over it, and in a case of the bottom line
trumping all, the prayer cards have largely vanished as in-flight
meals have. But the salient point is that under United States law,
freedom of religious expression trumps many other rights.
A related factor is the surprisingly vague status of the workplace in
the eyes of the law. You might think that the establishment clause of
the First Amendment forbids religious expression in a federal
workplace, but in 1997, President Clinton issued guidelines creating a
broad area of religious freedom for federal employees, including the
right to evangelize, while forbidding government endorsement of a
religion. Curiously, the situation regarding corporations is less
clear. Is a bank -- or a restaurant or a factory or a corporate
headquarters -- in the public or the private realm? "The separation of
church and state is as firmly established as any doctrine can be, but
the separation of corporation and state is not nearly as well
defined," says Alan Wolfe, director of the Boisi Center for Religion
and American Public Life at Boston College. "An issue like the role of
religion in the workplace is fuzzy because we've never defined the
public nature of a corporation. And I think many corporations
themselves have been confused about how to deal with it."
Beginning in the 90's, many large corporations were sued by employees
who claimed discrimination in hiring and promotions because of race,
gender or sexual orientation. In the aftermath, as a vehicle for
handling diversity issues, some corporations formed or formalized
employee "affinity groups" -- complete with bylaws and objectives --
that could meet on company property, often during the lunch hour, and
would be given a small budget from the corporation. Some companies
included religious groups in their roster of affinity groups; others
balked -- apparently confused about how to deal with religion.
"Employers thought if they allowed religious expression in the
workplace, they would get in trouble legally," says Jay Sekulow, the
chief counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice. "It was a
knee-jerk response. But the tide has turned, and it's a much more
receptive environment today." Not everyone is on board, though.
General Motors is involved in a lawsuit right now brought by an
employee who has demanded the right to form a Christian group under
G.M.'s affinity-group program. Coca-Cola, as part of the settlement of
a $192 million racial-discrimination suit brought by employees, agreed
to establish affinity groups, but religious groups are not among them.
There is a Christian group operating within the company, which the
workplace-ministry leader Os Hillman points out as an example of the
acceptance the movement has won at big corporations, but Coca-Cola
begs to differ. "The Christian group here is almost an underground
group, and they're certainly not company sanctioned," says Racquel
White, a Coca-Cola spokeswoman. "We don't sanction political or
religious groups. What happened was, a number of employee groups
popped up after our discrimination suit. They're not supposed to be
doing it. Our preference is to stay out of these types of stories.
Frankly, we'd rather not even talk to you about it."
That kind of corporate thinking seems to be on the way out, however.
"The large corporations tend to be agnostic, not only with respect to
religion but everything," Alan Wolfe says. "They don't want to offend
anybody who is a potential market. They tend to think of themselves as
in the public sphere and to institute policies according to their
perception of political correctness."
Which brings us to the Pacific Northwest. We are in a gray conference
room at one of the Oregon campuses of Intel, the world's biggest maker
of computer chips. Sixteen engineers and programmers sit around a
table during lunch hour, eating pizza and sandwiches from the company
cafeteria and discussing the Book of Ruth. William McSpadden, a
43-year-old design engineer, father of five and hardcore weekend
soccer coach, leads the Bible study. He describes the 200 or so local
participants in the Intel Bible-Based Christian Network as "about half
conservative Christians, even fundamentalists, with the rest being
Presbyterians, Methodists, Catholics and the like."
Intel was in the forefront of public corporations that brought
religion into the mix of their employee groups, thanks in part to the
fact that one of its corporate heads, Patrick Gelsinger, its chief
technology officer, is an evangelical Christian who has written a book
on faith and work. The Bible network became an authorized company
affinity group in 1997. There are four Bible-study sessions per week
here at the Jones Farm campus, where 4,700 of the company's 15,000
employees work, plus special events and a monthly faith-at-work
community-outreach gathering at a local Borders. "When I started at
Intel in 1983, we had an informal Bible-study group," McSpadden says
after the Bible-study meeting as he erases the whiteboard and his
colleagues head back to work. "The company probably didn't even know
it was going on. Its being formalized basically makes life easier. It
means I can book a conference room without feeling I'm going against
company wishes."
An hour later, in a smaller conference room in which a prayer rug lies
angled toward Mecca, 12 men -- members of the Intel Muslim Employee
Group -- stream in in ones and twos, go through the ritual motions of
prayer, chat with one another for a few minutes, then head back to
work. Like the company's 17 other diversity groups, the Muslims get a
budget of about $2,300 a year from Intel and a designated space.
Mostafa Arifin, a 29-year-old computer engineer from Bangladesh
wearing a scruffy beard and an Eddie Bauer T-shirt, says there are
about 100 participants in the Muslim group at the Jones Farm campus,
nearly all of them men from overseas. Mostly they meet to pray, but
occasionally they hold events. After 9/11, they discovered they had a
public-education role to play, and they held sessions on Islam in the
cafeteria.
So this is sort of a best-case scenario of how religion in the
workplace is playing out at large companies. Religious groups at Intel
are on equal footing with the Parents Group, the Recent College
Graduates Group, the Latino Network and the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and
Transgender Group. Yet there remains a slight difference between the
Christians and the other religious groups. David Nash, of the Jewish
employee group, says his members wouldn't dream of trying to attract
other Intel employees to Judaism, and the Muslims say much the same
thing.
McSpadden says he worried at first that the company would disallow
proselytizing: "We were a little concerned. One of the key tenets of
Christianity is evangelism, and if they said Bible study couldn't
involve evangelism, that would be difficult for us." This is the sort
of thing that gives diversity-training professionals headaches. "There
are traps all around this issue," says Mauricio Velasquez, C.E.O. of
the Diversity Training Group, a consulting agency in Virginia. "A boss
says, 'I was only proselytizing.' And the employee says, 'No, you're
excluding me from opportunities because I'm not a Christian.' How do
you prove it?"
According to McSpadden, this isn't a problem at Intel. The company
allows the Christian group to proselytize, provided it's within the
confines of their meetings. And that seems to keep it tidy -- and
marginalized. Bernie Dehler, another participant in the Intel
Bible-Based Christian Network, notes that the results of their
evangelizing efforts are puny. When I was at Intel, bulletin boards in
the hallways featured designs advertising an ice cream social
sponsored by the Bible network. "Thousands of people see those signs,
and we'll get maybe 30 at the ice cream social," Dehler said. And he
added cheerfully, "We're weird, and we know it."
Back in Minnesota, as Chuck Ripka and I were leaving the bank to go to
a meeting of local business leaders, a small encounter took place that
was treated as so commonplace by everyone involved that I failed to
see its significance at first. A couple -- a man in a track suit and a
very pregnant woman -- showed up at the bank asking to see Ripka. He
greeted them warmly. They looked distressed but hopeful.
They were having all sorts of problems. She was about to have her
fifth child, and they were short of money: they needed $80,000 right
away. The man was in the ministry -- he works with children whose
parents are incarcerated -- and the couple's church, which caters to
recent immigrants, was on the brink of financial collapse. They
weren't coming to Ripka for a loan, however, but for spiritual
guidance. They were feeling lost and overwhelmed by all their
problems. "The Lord put it in my mind to come and pray with Chuck
today," the woman told me, so on the spot they drove the 40 miles to
the bank. Ripka prayed with them, asking Christ to give them peace and
strength, and the couple were visibly overjoyed by the experience.
So there you have a sort of representative, topsy-turvy vignette for
this story: a minister and his wife seeking out a mortgage banker for
spiritual guidance and gratefully receiving his prayers in the bank
parking lot.
Ripka then asked the couple to come with us to the meeting we were
going to attend. The four of us drove a mile down the road, crossing
the Mississippi into the city of Elk River. At a room in the public
library, we found 25 men -- they were all men, as it happened --
sitting in a circle on metal chairs and taking turns praying. When
Ripka introduced the couple, they were given chairs in the center of
the circle, and the men prayed for them and their ministry and family.
Then began a series of prayers for the well-being of the community,
prayers so intense that some of the men had tears in their eyes.
Later I met several of the men for lunch at the Olde Main Eatery
downtown. One owns the local fitness center; another runs a
heating-oil business. As they talked, their ideas and objectives
expanded. It turned out that their group -- Pray Elk River -- is part
of a network of municipal officials, ministers and small-business
owners across the country that has the goal of winning whole towns
over to Christ. One component of that is organizing "intercessory
prayer" teams. It is the belief of many Christians that targeted,
concentrated prayer aimed at a problem can work like a laser to
destroy it. Stephanie Klinzing, the mayor, who is part of the group,
told me that the purpose of Pray Elk River is to bring together
church, government and marketplace leaders to help the community. "We
have a group of intercessors who pray for the town council, for the
city, for me as mayor," she said. Ripka is part of this. "When she has
difficulties as mayor," he said, "she'll call me and some others and
ask us to pray over it." It turns out that even before the Riverview
Community Bank was built, intercessors were praying over the bare
ground where the building would be erected.
Rick Heeren -- a businessman and the author of "Thank God It's
Monday!" -- is the Midwest representative for the national umbrella
organization, which is called Harvest Evangelism. He told me that
Harvest Evangelism had chosen Elk River as a "detonator city" through
which, ultimately, the nation will be turned to Jesus Christ. (Other
detonator cities include Honolulu and San Jose.) The Pray Elk River
group has organized prayer sessions at businesses, in the schools,
over the local radio station and at a public "prayer fair." Harvest
Evangelism also links small businesses around the country to aid
third-world communities in a combined spiritual and economic revival.
As Heeren talked, I began to situate Ripka and his bank in a larger
picture. At the mega-corporate level, places like Intel and American
Express deal with the unwieldy phenomenon of marketplace Christianity
by squeezing it into neat, politically correct clothing, but the
Riverview Community Banks of the world don't feel the need to conform
to a dress code. A lot of people in communities around the country are
hungry for the message of Christ's blessing, and small-business
leaders are ready to serve their constituencies in this new way, to
bring the product to market.
But as Christianity moves into a broader arena, directly confronting
some of the social mores that an open, secular society is built on, it
presents a new challenge. A question that will probably be asked as
the movement grows is, This is legal, but is it right? Protecting
religion and religious expression is one hallmark of American society.
Another is protecting minorities. And there is probably no more
insidious form of bullying than religion.
It's possible, though, that the point will become moot. While
marketplace Christianity has the law on its side -- as well as
America's deep and historic regard for religious faith -- other forces
may work against it. Alan Wolfe says he thinks the phenomenon has a
natural limit. Evangelicals and other Christians who are charged to
spread the Word in secular society, he argues, face becoming
contaminated by that society. Unlike fundamentalists, who withdraw
from the secular culture, they engage it, using pop music, books,
television and now the workplace to spread their message. But as you
do that, the message becomes swamped by the might of the broader
culture. Wolfe points to the Coors beer company as an example. "They
used to be known as an evangelical company -- never mind the fact that
they were selling beer in the first place, a product that used to be
considered a sin -- but as they grew, that spiritual purity changed.
Today their television advertisements are almost pornographic." The
challenge, Wolfe says, is for the workplace ministries to keep their
faith pure as they expand. As if on cue, the same day I spoke to
Wolfe, Chuck Ripka called to tell me that the Riverview bank was
expanding, adding its first branch in the town of Anoka, 10 miles
away.
There are certainly no signs of Ripka's faith becoming diluted,
however. When I first visited the bank, I discovered that besides the
chance to spread the Word via this magazine, there was one other thing
Ripka wanted from me in exchange for his participation in the article:
my soul. He had invited two other marketplace pastors -- a dentist and
the owner of a dental laboratory -- to join us in his office. Shortly
after we sat down, they began to pray.
They prayed for me, for my family, for this article, for the Lord to
guide my pen, for The New York Times, for the media in general, for
secular society. Then they pulled out a vial and began anointing me
with oil -- a practice from early Judaism and Christianity that some
Christians today have revived -- and prayed for me all over again. As
a result, I can report that having people pray over you feels just
fine, like getting praise and a shoulder massage and an offer of help
all in one. And as a small personal reflection on the central issue of
this article, I'm also prepared to impart how it feels to have a
banker, a dentist and a businessman pray for your immortal soul in a
bank. It feels weird.
-------
Russell Shorto is a contributing writer for the magazine and the
author, most recently, of "The Island at the Center of the World."
.

User: "Stuart Warren"
Title: Re: Will religion be the next workplace issue?	02 Nov 2004 02:20:04 AM

"MrPepper11" <MrPepper11@go.com> wrote in message
news:57cfd534.0410311606.24a37151@posting.google.com...
<good article, snipped for length>
Interesting observations. While a business does not have the right to
discriminate against a person's values, there's nothing wrong with them
espousing their own. In other words, a trailer park can't evict you if
you're not a redneck, but it's not their fault if you don't want to live
there because you don't like rednecks.
Indeed, I fully support the creation of such enclaves of ideology. The
rampant, ubiquitous obsession with political correctness and inclusiveness
at the expensive of individuality is whitewashing the country, and left
unchecked will bear us a drab, apathetic "Nation X."
Stuart Warren
.

User: "Ike"
Title: Re: Will religion be the next workplace issue?	31 Oct 2004 10:06:58 PM

"MrPepper11" <MrPepper11@go.com> wrote in message
news:57cfd534.0410311606.24a37151@posting.google.com...

The New York Times wastes trees.
--
Freedom of thought entails no "Intellectual Property".
.

User: "Iain"
Title: Re: Will religion be the next workplace issue?	01 Nov 2004 02:05:20 PM

(MrPepper11) wrote in message news:<57cfd534.0410311606.24a37151@posting.google.com>...
<snip>
Ah dinna ken whit religioun is treatit as different frae hings sic
tither. Naebody can compleen aboot haein tae work amang dreich
wallpaper, gin werkin for Her Maijestie.
Ah ken kirk an state shouldna werk togidder, tho thon's nowt wrang wi
a religious environs.
~Iain
.

User: "Arthur L. Rubin"
Title: Re: Will religion be the next workplace issue?	01 Nov 2004 12:21:19 PM

MrPepper11 wrote:

<<copyright violation SNIPPED>>

Well, all right, this is strange-sounding stuff. To someone unfamiliar
with marketplace Christianity, the questions pile up. Is this legal?
Aren't there separation-of-church-and-state issues here somewhere?
What about discrimination?

Good questions.

Maybe. Maybe not. If it creates an environment of harassment,
even if it is not objectively harassment, and no objective harassment
occurs, it could still be illegal religious discrimination.
Also, banks cannot discriminate against customers on a religious
basis, which may include proselytizing them.
.

User: "Katherine Griffis-Greenberg"
Title: Re: Will religion be the next workplace issue?	01 Nov 2004 03:14:13 AM

On 31 Oct 2004 16:06:09 -0800,

(MrPepper11) in
misc.legal, wrote the following:
(Quoting Mr. Shorto's article)

As it happens, thanks to the value American law places on religious
expression, proselytizing on the job is perfectly legal, even in a
government workplace, even when it's the boss who is doing the
pushing. If the legal aspects of the Christian-workplace phenomenon
seem bewildering, it may be because, while the United States has
always been a deeply religious nation, until recently it has also been
fairly resolute about keeping faith out of the public sphere. Thomas
Jefferson's famous metaphor of a wall of separation between church and
state has long been a part of the national psyche. The historical
reasons for erecting that wall are worth restating. The European
experience of the 16th and 17th centuries, the effects of which
carried over into the 18th, was of state-sponsored religious warfare,
of populations decimated and minorities oppressed in the name of one
branch of Christianity or another. Part of the genius and daring of
the framers of the American system was in their decision to break with
the European tradition of establishing a national church, in their
conviction that religion was too combustible a material to be fused
with political power.

You might think that recent religion-inspired violence would result in
a renewed conviction to keep religion out of the public sphere, yet
just the opposite has been happening. A major response in this country
to Islamic terrorism has been a rippling of Christian muscle. In the
post-9/11 universe, Christians have become more aggressive in pushing
a religious agenda on social issues ranging from gay marriage to
stem-cell research. "The whole war on terror has made evangelicals
more politically engaged," says Michael Cromartie of the Ethics and
Public Policy Center.

That is all the more reason to separate church and corporations out of
the political arena, IMO. Jefferson was right in that regard:
government has no right to interfere with religion, nor religion with
government:
"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law."
-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Dr. Thomas Cooper, February 10, 1814
"I am for freedom of religion, and against all maneuvers to bring about
a legal ascendency of one sect over another."
--Thomas Jefferson to Elbridge Gerry, 1799. ME 10:78
"We have no right to prejudice another in his civil enjoyments because
he is of another church."
--Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Religion, 1776. Papers 1:546
"The declaration that religious faith shall be unpunished does not give
immunity to criminal acts dictated by religious error."
--Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1788. ME 7:98
"I am really mortified to be told that, in the United States of America,
a fact like this [i.e., the purchase of an apparent geological or
astronomical work] can become a subject of inquiry, and of criminal
inquiry too, as an offense against religion; that a question about the
sale of a book can be carried before the civil magistrate. Is this then
our freedom of religion? and are we to have a censor whose imprimatur
shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy? And who is thus
to dogmatize religious opinions for our citizens? Whose foot is to be
the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched? Is a priest to
be our inquisitor, or shall a layman, simple as ourselves, set up his
reason as the rule for what we are to read, and what we must believe? It
is an insult to our citizens to question whether they are rational
beings or not, and blasphemy against religion to suppose it cannot stand
the test of truth and reason. If [this] book be false in its facts,
disprove them; if false in its reasoning, refute it. But, for God's
sake, let us freely hear both sides, if we choose."
--Thomas Jefferson to N. G. Dufief, 1814. ME 14:127
"To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation
of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical."
--Thomas Jefferson: Bill for Religious Freedom, 1779. Papers 2:545
"The proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying
upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument
unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion is
depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages to which,
in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right."
--Thomas Jefferson: Statute for Religious Freedom, 1779. ME 2:301,
Papers 2:546
"Whenever... preachers, instead of a lesson in religion, put [their
congregation] off with a discourse on the Copernican system, on chemical
affinities, on the construction of government, or the characters or
conduct of those administering it, it is a breach of contract, depriving
their audience of the kind of service for which they are salaried, and
giving them, instead of it, what they did not want, or, if wanted, would
rather seek from better sources in that particular art of science."
--Thomas Jefferson to P. H. Wendover, 1815. ME 14:281
"Religion is a subject on which I have ever been most scrupulously
reserved. I have considered it as a matter between every man and his
Maker in which no other, and far less the public, had a right to
intermeddle."
--Thomas Jefferson to Richard Rush, 1813.
"No religious reading, instruction or exercise, shall be prescribed or
practiced [in the elementary schools] inconsistent with the tenets of
_any_ religious sect or denomination."
--Thomas Jefferson: Elementary School Act, 1817. ME 17:425
"One of the amendments to the Constitution... expressly declares that
'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or
prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of
speech, or of the press,' thereby guarding in the same sentence and
under the same words, the freedom of religion, of speech, and of the
press; insomuch that whatever violates either throws down the sanctuary
which covers the others."
--Thomas Jefferson: Draft Kentucky Resolutions, 1798. ME 17:382
"But a short time elapsed after the death of the great reformer of the
Jewish religion, before his principles were departed from by those who
professed to be his special servants, and perverted into an engine for
enslaving mankind, and aggrandizing their oppressors in Church and
State."
--Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, 1810. ME 12:345
"[When] the [Virginia] bill for establishing religious freedom... was
finally passed,... a singular proposition proved that its protection of
opinion was meant to be universal. Where the preamble declares that
coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our
religion, an amendment was proposed, by inserting the word 'Jesus
Christ,' so that it should read 'a departure from the plan of Jesus
Christ, the holy author of our religion.' _The insertion was rejected by
a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend within the
mantle of its protection the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and
Mahometan, the Hindoo and infidel of every denomination_."
--Thomas Jefferson: Autobiography, 1821. ME 1:67
"History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people
maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of
ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always
avail themselves for their own purposes."
-Thomas Jefferson to Alexander von Humboldt, Dec. 6, 1813.
"[If] the nature of... government [were] a subordination of the civil to
the ecclesiastical power, I [would] consider it as desperate for long
years to come. Their steady habits [will] exclude the advances of
information, and they [will] seem exactly where they [have always been].
And there [the] clergy will always keep them if they can. [They] will
follow the bark of liberty only by the help of a tow-rope."
--Thomas Jefferson to Pierrepont Edwards, July 1801.
"To suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of
opinion and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on
supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy which at once
destroys all religious liberty, because he being of course judge of that
tendency will make his opinions the rule of judgment and approve or
condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square with or
differ from his own."
--Thomas Jefferson: Statute for Religious Freedom, 1779. ME 2:302,
Papers 2: 546
"Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between
man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his
worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only,
and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the
whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make
no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free
exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between church and
State."
-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Danbury Baptist Association, CT., Jan. 1,
1802
"I do not believe it is for the interest of religion to invite the civil
magistrate to direct its exercises, its discipline, or its doctrines;
nor of the religious societies, that the General Government should be
invested with the power of effecting any uniformity of time or matter
among them. Fasting and prayer are religious exercises. The enjoining
them, an act of discipline. Every religious society has a right to
determine for itself the times for these exercises and the objects
proper for them according to their own particular tenets; and this right
can never be safer than in their own hands where the Constitution has
deposited it... Everyone must act according to the dictates of his own
reason, and mine tells me that civil powers alone have been given to the
President of the United States, and no authority to direct the religious
exercises of his constituents."
--Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Miller, 1808. ME 11:429
"I do not know that it is a duty to disturb by missionaries the religion
and peace of other countries, who may think themselves bound to
extinguish by fire and fagot the heresies to which we give the name of
conversions, and quote our own example for it. Were the Pope, or his
holy allies, to send in mission to us some thousands of Jesuit priests
to convert us to their orthodoxy, I suspect that we should deem and
treat it as a national aggression on our peace and faith."
--Thomas Jefferson to Michael Megear, 1823. ME 15:434
=========
LEGEND:
ME= The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (ME), Memorial Edition (Lipscomb
and Bergh, editors); 20 Vols., Washington, D.C., 1903-04.
Papers = The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Papers). Edited by Julian P.
Boyd 60 Vols., Princeton, 1950-. . . 28 vols. complete to date.
--
Katherine Griffis-Greenberg
Oriental Institute
Oriental Studies Doctoral Program [Egyptology]
University of Oxford
Oxford, United Kingdom
http://www.griffis-consulting.com
.

User: "Pastor Dave"
Title: Re: Will religion be the next workplace issue?	03 Nov 2004 07:51:58 AM

On Mon, 01 Nov 2004 09:14:13 +0000, while wondering if
all people love cupcakes, Katherine Griffis-Greenberg
<egylist@deadspamgriffis-consulting.com> yodeled:

On 31 Oct 2004 16:06:09 -0800,

(MrPepper11) in
misc.legal, wrote the following:

(Quoting Mr. Shorto's article)

That is all the more reason to separate church and corporations out of
the political arena, IMO. Jefferson was right in that regard:
government has no right to interfere with religion, nor religion with
government:

"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law."

-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Dr. Thomas Cooper, February 10, 1814

"I am for freedom of religion, and against all maneuvers to bring about
a legal ascendency of one sect over another."

--Thomas Jefferson to Elbridge Gerry, 1799. ME 10:78

"We have no right to prejudice another in his civil enjoyments because
he is of another church."

--Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Religion, 1776. Papers 1:546

"The declaration that religious faith shall be unpunished does not give
immunity to criminal acts dictated by religious error."

--Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1788. ME 7:98

"I am really mortified to be told that, in the United States of America,
a fact like this [i.e., the purchase of an apparent geological or
astronomical work] can become a subject of inquiry, and of criminal
inquiry too, as an offense against religion; that a question about the
sale of a book can be carried before the civil magistrate. Is this then
our freedom of religion? and are we to have a censor whose imprimatur
shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy? And who is thus
to dogmatize religious opinions for our citizens? Whose foot is to be
the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched? Is a priest to
be our inquisitor, or shall a layman, simple as ourselves, set up his
reason as the rule for what we are to read, and what we must believe? It
is an insult to our citizens to question whether they are rational
beings or not, and blasphemy against religion to suppose it cannot stand
the test of truth and reason. If [this] book be false in its facts,
disprove them; if false in its reasoning, refute it. But, for God's
sake, let us freely hear both sides, if we choose."

--Thomas Jefferson to N. G. Dufief, 1814. ME 14:127

"To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation
of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical."

--Thomas Jefferson: Bill for Religious Freedom, 1779. Papers 2:545

"The proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying
upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument
unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion is
depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages to which,
in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right."

--Thomas Jefferson: Statute for Religious Freedom, 1779. ME 2:301,
Papers 2:546

"Whenever... preachers, instead of a lesson in religion, put [their
congregation] off with a discourse on the Copernican system, on chemical
affinities, on the construction of government, or the characters or
conduct of those administering it, it is a breach of contract, depriving
their audience of the kind of service for which they are salaried, and
giving them, instead of it, what they did not want, or, if wanted, would
rather seek from better sources in that particular art of science."

--Thomas Jefferson to P. H. Wendover, 1815. ME 14:281

"Religion is a subject on which I have ever been most scrupulously
reserved. I have considered it as a matter between every man and his
Maker in which no other, and far less the public, had a right to
intermeddle."

--Thomas Jefferson to Richard Rush, 1813.

"No religious reading, instruction or exercise, shall be prescribed or
practiced [in the elementary schools] inconsistent with the tenets of
_any_ religious sect or denomination."

--Thomas Jefferson: Elementary School Act, 1817. ME 17:425

"One of the amendments to the Constitution... expressly declares that
'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or
prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of
speech, or of the press,' thereby guarding in the same sentence and
under the same words, the freedom of religion, of speech, and of the
press; insomuch that whatever violates either throws down the sanctuary
which covers the others."

--Thomas Jefferson: Draft Kentucky Resolutions, 1798. ME 17:382

"But a short time elapsed after the death of the great reformer of the
Jewish religion, before his principles were departed from by those who
professed to be his special servants, and perverted into an engine for
enslaving mankind, and aggrandizing their oppressors in Church and
State."

--Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, 1810. ME 12:345

"[When] the [Virginia] bill for establishing religious freedom... was
finally passed,... a singular proposition proved that its protection of
opinion was meant to be universal. Where the preamble declares that
coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our
religion, an amendment was proposed, by inserting the word 'Jesus
Christ,' so that it should read 'a departure from the plan of Jesus
Christ, the holy author of our religion.' _The insertion was rejected by
a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend within the
mantle of its protection the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and
Mahometan, the Hindoo and infidel of every denomination_."

--Thomas Jefferson: Autobiography, 1821. ME 1:67

"History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people
maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of
ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always
avail themselves for their own purposes."

-Thomas Jefferson to Alexander von Humboldt, Dec. 6, 1813.

"[If] the nature of... government [were] a subordination of the civil to
the ecclesiastical power, I [would] consider it as desperate for long
years to come. Their steady habits [will] exclude the advances of
information, and they [will] seem exactly where they [have always been].
And there [the] clergy will always keep them if they can. [They] will
follow the bark of liberty only by the help of a tow-rope."

--Thomas Jefferson to Pierrepont Edwards, July 1801.

"To suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of
opinion and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on
supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy which at once
destroys all religious liberty, because he being of course judge of that
tendency will make his opinions the rule of judgment and approve or
condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square with or
differ from his own."

--Thomas Jefferson: Statute for Religious Freedom, 1779. ME 2:302,
Papers 2: 546

"Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between
man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his
worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only,
and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the
whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make
no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free
exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between church and
State."

-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Danbury Baptist Association, CT., Jan. 1,
1802

"I do not believe it is for the interest of religion to invite the civil
magistrate to direct its exercises, its discipline, or its doctrines;
nor of the religious societies, that the General Government should be
invested with the power of effecting any uniformity of time or matter
among them. Fasting and prayer are religious exercises. The enjoining
them, an act of discipline. Every religious society has a right to
determine for itself the times for these exercises and the objects
proper for them according to their own particular tenets; and this right
can never be safer than in their own hands where the Constitution has
deposited it... Everyone must act according to the dictates of his own
reason, and mine tells me that civil powers alone have been given to the
President of the United States, and no authority to direct the religious
exercises of his constituents."

--Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Miller, 1808. ME 11:429

"I do not know that it is a duty to disturb by missionaries the religion
and peace of other countries, who may think themselves bound to
extinguish by fire and fagot the heresies to which we give the name of
conversions, and quote our own example for it. Were the Pope, or his
holy allies, to send in mission to us some thousands of Jesuit priests
to convert us to their orthodoxy, I suspect that we should deem and
treat it as a national aggression on our peace and faith."

--Thomas Jefferson to Michael Megear, 1823. ME 15:434
=========
LEGEND:

ME= The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (ME), Memorial Edition (Lipscomb
and Bergh, editors); 20 Vols., Washington, D.C., 1903-04.

Papers = The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Papers). Edited by Julian P.
Boyd 60 Vols., Princeton, 1950-. . . 28 vols. complete to date.

Just because Thomas Jefferson felt that way, that does
not mean that all of the founding fathers did and his
letter about separation of church and state was not the
opinion of everyone either, or it would have been in
the First Amendment clearly stated as he wrote it.
There were many involved in the writing of the
Constitution and the only thing it actually says, is
that government cannot interfere with the founding of
religion. It does not say that faith has no place in
affairs of the government. If that were true, we
wouldn't have all of those items in the government,
that express faith in God and for the legal system to
now use TJ's letter, as if it were ratified, is
ridiculous. It was TJ's opinion, nothing more and does
not necessarily express the opinion of all. As I said,
if it did, we would see those words in the
Constitution.
--
Pastor Dave Raymond
"I have more understanding than all my teachers:
for thy testimonies are my meditation." - Psalm 119:99
/
o{}xxxxx[]::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::>
\
"And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of
the Spirit, which is the word of God:" - Ephesians 6:17
.

User: "Katherine Griffis-Greenberg"
Title: Re: Will religion be the next workplace issue?	03 Nov 2004 12:23:44 PM

On Wed, 03 Nov 2004 13:51:58 GMT, Pastor Dave
<pastordave38@nospam-yahoo.com> in misc.legal, wrote the following:

While many of America's colonial statesmen practiced Christianity, our
most influential Founding Fathers broke away from traditional religious
thinking. For example:
As John Adams noted in his "A Defence of the Constitutions of Government
of the United States of America" [1787-1788]:
"The United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the first example
of governments erected on the simple principles of nature; and if men
are now sufficiently enlightened to disabuse themselves of artifice,
imposture, hypocrisy, and superstition, they will consider this event as
an era in their history. Although the detail of the formation of the
American governments is at present little known or regarded either in
Europe or in America, it may hereafter become an object of curiosity. It
will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had
interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the influence of
Heaven, more than those at work upon ships or houses, or laboring in
merchandise or agriculture; it will forever be acknowledged that these
governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses.
". . . Thirteen governments [of the original states] thus founded on the
natural authority of the people alone, without a pretence of miracle or
mystery, and which are destined to spread over the northern part of that
whole quarter of the globe, are a great point gained in favor of the
rights of mankind."
More information on the rejection of a "religious basis" to the United
States Declaration of Independence and Constitution by the Founding
Fathers can be found here:
http://earlyamerica.com/review/summer97/secular.html
Little-Known U.S. Document Signed by President Adams Proclaims America's
Government Is Secular
George Washington:
Washington revealed almost nothing to indicate his spiritual frame of
mind, hardly a mark of a devout Christian. In his thousands of letters,
the name of Jesus Christ never appears. He rarely spoke about his
religion, but his Freemasonry experience points to a belief in deism.
Washington's initiation occurred at the Fredericksburg Lodge on 4
November 1752, later becoming a Master mason in 1799, and remained a
freemason until he died.
To the United Baptist Churches in Virginia in May, 1789, Washington said
that every man "ought to be protected in worshipping the Deity according
to the dictates of his own conscience."
After Washington's death, Dr. Abercrombie, a friend of his, replied to a
Dr. Wilson, who had interrogated him about Washington's religion
replied, "Sir, Washington was a Deist."
-------------
Thomas Jefferson:
Even most Christians do not consider Jefferson a Christian. In many of
his letters, he denounced the superstitions of Christianity. He did not
believe in spiritual souls, angels or godly miracles. Although Jefferson
did admire the morality of Jesus, Jefferson did not think him divine,
nor did he believe in the Trinity or the miracles of Jesus. In a letter
to Peter Carr, 10 August 1787, he wrote, "Question with boldness even
the existence of a god."
Jefferson believed in materialism, reason, and science. He never
admitted to any religion but his own. In a letter to Ezra Stiles Ely, 25
June 1819, he wrote, "You say you are a Calvinist. I am not. I am of a
sect by myself, as far as I know
--------------
James Madison:
Called the father of the Constitution, Madison had no conventional sense
of Christianity. In 1785, Madison wrote in his Memorial and Remonstrance
against Religious Assessments:
"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."
"What influence, in fact, have ecclesiastical establishments had on
society? In some instances they have been seen to erect a spiritual
tyranny on the ruins of the civil authority; on many instances they have
been seen upholding the thrones of political tyranny; in no instance
have they been the guardians of the liberties of the people. Rulers who
wish to subvert the public liberty may have found an established clergy
convenient auxiliaries. A just government, instituted to secure and
perpetuate it, needs them not."
---------------------
Benjamin Franklin:
Although Franklin received religious training, his nature forced him to
rebel against the irrational tenets of his parents Christianity. His
Autobiography revels his skepticism, "My parents had given me betimes
religions impressions, and I received from my infancy a pious education
in the principles of Calvinism. But scarcely was I arrived at fifteen
years of age, when, after having doubted in turn of different tenets,
according as I found them combated in the different books that I read, I
began to doubt of Revelation itself.
". . . Some books against Deism fell into my hands. . . It happened that
they wrought an effect on my quite contrary to what was intended by
them; for the arguments of the Deists, which were quoted to be refuted,
appeared to me much stronger than the refutations; in short, I soon
became a thorough Deist."
In an essay on "Toleration," Franklin wrote:
"If we look back into history for the character of the present sects in
Christianity, we shall find few that have not in their turns been
persecutors, and complainers of persecution. The primitive Christians
thought persecution extremely wrong in the Pagans, but practiced it on
one another. The first Protestants of the Church of England blamed
persecution in the Romish church, but practiced it upon the Puritans.
These found it wrong in the Bishops, but fell into the same practice
themselves both here [England] and in New England."
Dr. Priestley, an intimate friend of Franklin, wrote of him:
"It is much to be lamented that a man of Franklin's general good
character and great influence should have been an unbeliever in
Christianity, and also have done as much as he did to make others
unbelievers" (Priestley's Autobiography).
-------------------
Thomas Paine
This freethinker and author of several books, influenced more early
Americans than any other writer. Although he held Deist beliefs, he
wrote in his famous The Age of Reason:
"I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the
Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Protestant church, nor by any
church that I know of. My own mind is my church. "
"Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is no
more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifiying to man, more repugnant
to reason, and more contradictory to itself than this thing called
Christianity. "
++++++++++++++++++++++++
The U.S. Constitution
The most convincing evidence that our government did not ground itself
upon Christianity comes from the very document that defines it-- the
United States Constitution.
If indeed our Framers had aimed to found a Christian republic, it would
seem highly unlikely that they would have forgotten to leave out their
Christian intentions in the supreme law of the land. In fact, nowhere in
the Constitution do we have a single mention of Christianity, God,
Jesus, or any Supreme Being. There occurs only two references to
religion and they both use exclusionary wording. The 1st Amendment's
says, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of
religion. . ." and in Article VI, Section 3, ". . . no religious test
shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust
under the United States."
Thomas Jefferson interpreted the 1st Amendment in his famous letter to
the Danbury Baptist Association in January 1, 1802:
"I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American
people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law
respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free
exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between church and
State."
<...>
As Thomas Jefferson wrote in his Autobiography, in reference to the
Virginia Act for Religious Freedom:
"Where the preamble declares, that coercion is a departure from the plan
of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed by
inserting "Jesus Christ," so that it would read "A departure from the
plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion;" the insertion
was rejected by the great majority, in proof that they meant to
comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the
Gentile, the Christian and Mohammedan, the Hindoo and Infidel of every
denomination."
James Madison, perhaps the greatest supporter for separation of church
and State, and whom many refer to as the father of the Constitution,
also held similar views which he expressed in his letter to Edward
Livingston, 10 July 1822:
"And I have no doubt that every new example will succeed, as every past
one has done, in shewing that religion & Govt will both exist in greater
purity, the less they are mixed together."
<...>
The Declaration of Independence
Many Christians who think of America as founded upon Christianity
usually present the Declaration as "proof." The reason appears obvious:
the document mentions God. However, the God in the Declaration does not
describe Christianity's God. It describes "the Laws of Nature and of
Nature's God." This nature's view of God agrees with deist philosophy
but any attempt to use the Declaration as a support for Christianity
will fail for this reason alone.
More significantly, the Declaration does not represent the law of the
land as it came before the Constitution. The Declaration aimed at
announcing their separation from Great Britain and listed the various
grievances with the "thirteen united States of America." The grievances
against Great Britain no longer hold, and we have more than thirteen
states. Today, the Declaration represents an important historical
document about rebellious intentions against Great Britain at a time
before the formation of our independent government. Although the
Declaration may have influential power, it may inspire the lofty
thoughts of poets, and judges may mention it in their summations, it
holds no legal power today. Our presidents, judges and policemen must
take an oath to uphold the Constitution, but never to the Declaration of
Independence.
Of course the Declaration depicts a great political document, as it
aimed at a future government upheld by citizens instead of a religious
monarchy. It observed that all men "are created equal" meaning that we
all come inborn with the abilities of life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness. That "to secure these rights, governments are instituted
among men." The Declaration says nothing about our rights secured by
Christianity, nor does it imply anything about a Christian foundation.
Treaty of Tripoli
Unlike governments of the past, the American Fathers set up a government
divorced from religion. The establishment of a secular government did
not require a reflection to themselves about its origin; they knew this
as an unspoken given. However, as the U.S. delved into international
affairs, few foreign nations knew about the intentions of America. For
this reason, an insight from at a little known but legal document
written in the late 1700s explicitly reveals the secular nature of the
United States to a foreign nation. Officially called the "Treaty of
peace and friendship between the United States of America and the Bey
and Subjects of Tripoli, of Barbary," most refer to it as simply the
'Treaty of Tripoli.'
In Article 11, it states:
"As the Government of the United States of America is not in any sense
founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of
enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Musselmen; and as
the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility
against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no
pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an
interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries."
The preliminary treaty began with a signing on 4 November, 1796 (the end
of George Washington's last term as president). Joel Barlow, the
American diplomat served as counsel to Algiers and held responsibility
for the treaty negotiations. Barlow had once served under Washington as
a chaplain in the revolutionary army. He became good friends with Paine,
Jefferson, and read Enlightenment literature. Later he abandoned
Christian orthodoxy for rationalism and became an advocate of secular
government.
Barlow, along with his associate, Captain Richard O'Brien, et al,
translated and modified the Arabic version of the treaty into English.
From this came the added Amendment 11. Barlow forwarded the treaty to
U.S. legislators for approval in 1797. Timothy Pickering, the secretary
of state, endorsed it and John Adams concurred (now during his
presidency), sending the document on to the Senate. The Senate approved
the treaty on June 7, 1797, and officially ratified by the Senate with
John Adams signature on 10 June, 1797. All during this multi-review
process, the wording of Article 11 never raised the slightest concern.
The treaty even became public through its publication in The
Philadelphia Gazette on 17 June 1797.
So here we have a clear admission by the United States that our
government did not found itself upon Christianity. Unlike the
Declaration of Independence, this treaty represented U.S. law as all
treaties do according to the Constitution (see Article VI, Sect. 2).
Although the Christian exclusionary wording in the Treaty of Tripoli
only lasted for eight years and no longer has legal status, it clearly
represented the feelings of our Founding Fathers at the beginning of the
U.S. government.
----
Common Law
(Countering the belief that common law came from Christian foundations
and therefore the Constitution derives from it.)
....One of our principal Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson, elaborated
about the history of common law in his letter to Thomas Cooper on
February 10, 1814:
"For we know that the common law is that system of law which was
introduced by the Saxons on their settlement in England, and altered
from time to time by proper legislative authority from that time to the
date of Magna Charta, which terminates the period of the common law. . .
This settlement took place about the middle of the fifth century. But
Christianity was not introduced till the seventh century; the conversion
of the first christian king of the Heptarchy having taken place about
the year 598, and that of the last about 686. Here then, was a space of
two hundred years, during which the common law was in existence, and
Christianity no part of it.
". . . if any one chooses to build a doctrine on any law of that period,
supposed to have been lost, it is incumbent on him to prove it to have
existed, and what were its contents. These were so far alterations of
the common law, and became themselves a part of it. But none of these
adopt Christianity as a part of the common law. If, therefore, from the
settlement of the Saxons to the introduction of Christianity among them,
that system of religion could not be a part of the common law, because
they were not yet Christians, and if, having their laws from that period
to the close of the common law, we are all able to find among them no
such act of adoption, we may safely affirm (though contradicted by all
the judges and writers on earth) that Christianity neither is, nor ever
was a part of the common law."
In the same letter, Jefferson examined how the error spread about
Christianity and common law. Jefferson realized that a misinterpretation
had occurred with a Latin term by Prisot, "*ancien scripture*," in
reference to common law history. The term meant "ancient scripture" but
people had incorrectly interpreted it to mean "Holy Scripture," thus
spreading the myth that common law came from the Bible. Jefferson
writes:
"And Blackstone repeats, in the words of Sir Matthew Hale, that
'Christianity is part of the laws of England,' citing Ventris and
Strange ubi supra. 4. Blackst. 59. Lord Mansfield qualifies it a little
by saying that 'The essential principles of revealed religion are part
of the common law." In the case of the Chamberlain of London v. Evans,
1767. But he cites no authority, and leaves us at our peril to find out
what, in the opinion of the judge, and according to the measure of his
foot or his faith, are those essential principles of revealed religion
obligatory on us as a part of the common law."
Thus we find this string of authorities, when examined to the beginning,
all hanging on the same hook, a perverted expression of Priscot's, or on
one another, or nobody."
*The Encyclopedia Britannica, also describes the Saxon origin and adds:
"The nature of the new common law was at first much influenced by the
principles of Roman law, but later it developed more and more along
independent lines." Also prominent among the characteristics that
derived out of common law include the institution of the jury, and the
right to speedy trial.
Christian Sources
Virtually all the evidence that attempts to connect a foundation of
Christianity upon the government rests mainly on quotes and opinions
from a few of the colonial statesmen who had professed a belief in
Christianity. Sometimes the quotes come from their youth before their
introduction to Enlightenment ideas or simply from personal beliefs. But
statements of beliefs, by themselves, say nothing about Christianity as
the source of the U.S. government.
There did occur, however, some who wished a connection between church
and State. Patrick Henry, for example, proposed a tax to help sustain
"some form of Christian worship" for the state of Virginia. But
Jefferson and other statesmen did not agree. In 1779, Jefferson
introduced a bill for the Statute for Religious Freedom which became
Virginia law. Jefferson designed this law to completely separate
religion from government. None of Henry's Christian views ever got
introduced into Virginia's or U.S. Government law.
Unfortunately, later developments in our government have clouded early
history. The original Pledge of Allegiance, authored by Francis Bellamy
in 1892 did not contain the words "under God." Not until June 1954 did
those words appear in the Allegiance. The United States currency never
had "In God We Trust" printed on money until after the Civil War. Many
Christians who visit historical monuments and see the word "God"
inscribed in stone, automatically impart their own personal God of
Christianity, without understanding the Framers Deist context.
In the Supreme Court's 1892 Holy Trinity Church vs. United States,
Justice David Brewer wrote that "this is a Christian nation." Many
Christians use this as evidence. However, Brewer wrote this in dicta, as
a personal opinion only, and does not serve as a legal pronouncement.
Later Brewer felt obliged to explain himself: "But in what sense can
[the United States] be called a Christian nation? Not in the sense that
Christianity is the established religion or the people are compelled in
any manner to support it. On the contrary, the Constitution specifically
provides that 'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of
religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.' Neither is it
Christian in the sense that all its citizens are either in fact or in
name Christians. On the contrary, all religions have free scope within
its borders. Numbers of our people profess other religions, and many
reject all."
Conclusion
The Framers derived an independent government out of Enlightenment
thinking against the grievances caused by Great Britain. Our Founders
paid little heed to political beliefs about Christianity. The 1st
Amendment stands as the bulkhead against an establishment of religion
and at the same time insures the free expression of any belief. The
Treaty of Tripoli, an instrument of the Constitution, clearly stated our
non-Christian foundation. We inherited common law from Great Britain
which derived from pre-Christian Saxons rather than from Biblical
scripture.
<...>
"They all attributed the peaceful dominion of religion in their country
mainly to the separation of church and state. I do not hesitate to
affirm that during my stay in America I did not meet a single
individual, of the clergy or the laity, who was not of the same opinion
on this point."
-Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1835
Source: http://earlyamerica.com/review/summer97/secular.html
--
Katherine Griffis-Greenberg, J.D.
"Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is
left free to combat it."
(Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, 1801)
DISCLAIMER:
Not a practicing attorney, and no attorney-client relationship
is created. This response is for discussion purposes only. It
isn't meant to be legal advice. If you wish legal advice, seek
out an attorney in your own state who is familar with your
state's laws and applications thereof.
.

User: "Pastor Dave"
Title: Re: Will religion be the next workplace issue?	03 Nov 2004 07:18:59 PM

On Wed, 03 Nov 2004 18:23:44 +0000, while wondering if
all people love cupcakes, Katherine Griffis-Greenberg
<egylist@deadspamgriffis-consulting.com> yodeled:

On Wed, 03 Nov 2004 13:51:58 GMT, Pastor Dave
<pastordave38@nospam-yahoo.com> in misc.legal, wrote the following:

While many of America's colonial statesmen practiced Christianity, our
most influential Founding Fathers broke away from traditional religious
thinking. For example:

I can provide many quotes by the founding fathers that
promoted the idea of God in government.

As John Adams noted in his "A Defence of the Constitutions of Government
of the United States of America" [1787-1788]:

"The United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the first example
of governments erected on the simple principles of nature; and if men
are now sufficiently enlightened to disabuse themselves of artifice,
imposture, hypocrisy, and superstition, they will consider this event as
an era in their history. Although the detail of the formation of the
American governments is at present little known or regarded either in
Europe or in America, it may hereafter become an object of curiosity. It
will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had
interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the influence of
Heaven, more than those at work upon ships or houses, or laboring in
merchandise or agriculture; it will forever be acknowledged that these
governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses.

". . . Thirteen governments [of the original states] thus founded on the
natural authority of the people alone, without a pretence of miracle or
mystery, and which are destined to spread over the northern part of that
whole quarter of the globe, are a great point gained in favor of the
rights of mankind."

More information on the rejection of a "religious basis" to the United
States Declaration of Independence and Constitution by the Founding
Fathers can be found here:

http://earlyamerica.com/review/summer97/secular.html
Little-Known U.S. Document Signed by President Adams Proclaims America's
Government Is Secular

George Washington:

Washington revealed almost nothing to indicate his spiritual frame of
mind, hardly a mark of a devout Christian. In his thousands of letters,
the name of Jesus Christ never appears. He rarely spoke about his
religion, but his Freemasonry experience points to a belief in deism.
Washington's initiation occurred at the Fredericksburg Lodge on 4
November 1752, later becoming a Master mason in 1799, and remained a
freemason until he died.

To the United Baptist Churches in Virginia in May, 1789, Washington said
that every man "ought to be protected in worshipping the Deity according
to the dictates of his own conscience."

After Washington's death, Dr. Abercrombie, a friend of his, replied to a
Dr. Wilson, who had interrogated him about Washington's religion
replied, "Sir, Washington was a Deist."
-------------
Thomas Jefferson:

Even most Christians do not consider Jefferson a Christian. In many of
his letters, he denounced the superstitions of Christianity. He did not
believe in spiritual souls, angels or godly miracles. Although Jefferson
did admire the morality of Jesus, Jefferson did not think him divine,
nor did he believe in the Trinity or the miracles of Jesus. In a letter
to Peter Carr, 10 August 1787, he wrote, "Question with boldness even
the existence of a god."

Jefferson believed in materialism, reason, and science. He never
admitted to any religion but his own. In a letter to Ezra Stiles Ely, 25
June 1819, he wrote, "You say you are a Calvinist. I am not. I am of a
sect by myself, as far as I know
--------------
James Madison:

Called the father of the Constitution, Madison had no conventional sense
of Christianity. In 1785, Madison wrote in his Memorial and Remonstrance
against Religious Assessments:

"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."

"What influence, in fact, have ecclesiastical establishments had on
society? In some instances they have been seen to erect a spiritual
tyranny on the ruins of the civil authority; on many instances they have
been seen upholding the thrones of political tyranny; in no instance
have they been the guardians of the liberties of the people. Rulers who
wish to subvert the public liberty may have found an established clergy
convenient auxiliaries. A just government, instituted to secure and
perpetuate it, needs them not."
---------------------
Benjamin Franklin:

Although Franklin received religious tr