*

I took the photo of our northeast Iowa community from a bluff about a mile outside town. You can see the Winnishiek County Courthouse Clock Tower on the right and Saint Benedict’s Catholic Church Steeple just to its left.

State and church are separate.

Our community of 8,000 has 20 churches, a Zen Monastery, and a Quaker Meeting House. The closest Synagogue and Mosque are 60 miles away, in LaCrosse, Wisconsin.

I was born in 1949. My mother was raised a Catholic, and my father a Protestant. Before marriage in 1948, my mother asked my father to convert. He soon withdrew from the Catholic program because the priest insulted him, and my dad was not a believer. But he accepted that his three sons be raised Catholic.

When my father died of cancer at 71 in 1993, as my family was leaving the funeral parlor before the casket was closed, I looked back for one last look at my dad. I saw my mother place a rosary through the fingers of his defenseless hands.

She had never forgiven him for not converting. Or maybe she thought a rosary might save his soul.

I never asked her why.

But I’ve not forgotten that image.

*

Through its human institutions, religion provokes powerful feelings of longing, belonging, and exclusion. Though I have not been a practicing Catholic for over fifty years, I still feel its power when I enter one of its churches.

America’s Founders knew European history, particularly the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, and understood the power of religion to divide. (source)

That’s why the first words of the American Constitution’s Bill of Rights were about religious freedom.

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting its free exercise.”

Religion provokes powerful feelings.

So, the government shouldn’t take sides.

Separating religious institutions from government is a worthy ideal.

For E Pluribus Unum.