separation of church and state

Last week, Americans were forced to endure this year’s National Prayer Breakfast —the 70th since the unfortunate tradition, which ought to have been dropped as an embarrassing relic of early Cold War…

C’mon, admit it: you had the Kleenex handy while you watched the swearing-in of the 46th president with all of the attendant ruffles and flourishes. I certainly did. I doubt that any other…

“The federal government can’t take our money and give it to Joel Osteen or Robert Jeffress or Paula White—even in the wake of a pandemic,” I wrote back in May. But that’s exactly what Trump’s Small…

In the run up to Easter and the National Day of Prayer, chaplains and guest chaplains around the nation have sowed religious division and discord as they delivered prayers at state legislatures, and now, federal courts are giving them their stamp of approval.

The past couple of weeks have shown the country that, even though the Supreme Court has said prayers are constitutional, government bodies should stop organizing them. They are divisive, intimidating, coercive—and certainly unbecoming in bodies that represent our increasingly pluralistic communities.

Far from sending a troubling message, as Justice Alito contends, removing unconstitutional crosses maintained by the government on government land would send a clear and simple message: In the United States, the Constitution rules.

Every court to decide on such a cross has said that it must come down or be moved to private property, but the conservative Supreme Court majority may rule in its favor. Have we simply forgotten how well separation of church and state has worked?

The army inquires about soliders’ faiths because it doesn’t assume the people dying to defend this nation are Christian. When one views the cross in that light, it seems antithetical to the ideals for which those same soldiers fought.

On Monday, the Supreme Court took a dramatically new approach to the First Amendment, though you wouldn’t have known it from reading the brief, oversimplified opinion. In Trinity Lutheran Church of…

This morning’s presidential signing of an executive order “promoting free speech and religious liberty” isn’t the broad license to discriminate against LGBT people that many activists feared. Instead…