The problem with so-called religious conservatives is that they are not content to simply PRACTICE their religion in a country that guarantees their right to do so. They want to RUN that country politically. One of the problems with that is that the practice of their religion is, in part, to seek to prevent others from freely practicing a different religion. When the basis for a particular sect of any religion is to aggressively proselytize and convert it creates problems. It’s problematic because it ends up being as intrusive in the lives of other people as they feel others’ beliefs are intrusive in theirs. It fails the test of being considerate of other people’s beliefs.

Consider the Amish. When it’s time to raise a barn they throw in and raise it together for “one of their own,” a form of religious socialism, a kind of “all for one and one for all” approach to their social interaction. Many people admire this quality in them. They may not PRACTICE it, but they admire it. For a long time, in a culture where many people scoffed at their doing so, the Amish went to town for supplies in a horse and buggy. The difference is they were not out to see to it that everyone else in the country had to do the same thing. They were content to practice their religion in a country that secured their right to do so.

Religious conservatives are more aggressive. They are not content in this way. They see a world they want to run. This attitude is what leads to the kind of religious zeal that gets them more interested in controlling other people’s practices than in just being free to practice their own. This kind of zeal is what creates religious wars. This kind of zeal led to the Crusades, for example, a horrid, bloody exercise in imposing one’s religious beliefs on others.

Awareness of this danger forms the center of gravity for the founding fathers’ idea of separation of church and state. They knew that there was a BIG DIFFERENCE between the practice of religious freedom and religion as over-arching GOVERNMENT.

Just because this concept is easy to grasp for most people does not mean that everyone understands it. One of the safeguards of Democracy is that the voice of the people is diverse. While this diversity makes decision-making somewhat more cumbersome at times, it also prevents the decisions that affect us all from being made by one small group of people.

This is a good thing. This is a uniquely American value. We ought to hang onto it.

STEPHEN D. BRUNO

Hayden