Assuming that they still teach history in school, then students today are learning — just as I did almost 50 years ago — that many of the early settlers of the American colonies were people who were escaping from religious persecution in Europe.

They came to these distant shores to get away from tyrants or oppressive majorities who sought either to impose their beliefs on everyone or to deprive minorities of the ability to freely express their own intrinsic beliefs in their daily lives.

Sadly, many of these persecuted minorities found themselves in colonies which were no better than the countries they had fled. Catholics and Protestants were just as much at war in the New World as in the Old, and non-believers were even worse off. The Maryland Toleration Act of 1649, for instance, protected anyone who “professed to believe in Jesus Christ” but put at risk of death by execution those settlers who denied the divinity of Jesus or even the concept of the Triune God.

Such failed experiments in toleration and diversity led the Founding Fathers in their wisdom to declare matters of conscience and religion to be “off limits.” As the First Amendment commanded, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...”

The first part of the amendment has been very successfully implemented down through the decades since 1787. There has been no effort to impose or declare a state religion in the United States that all citizens must follow.

But the second clause “prohibiting the free exercise thereof” has been a much trickier proposition. For years, of course, there was no doubt that freedom to exercise one’s religion meant the state had to honor one’s religious conscience. Thus, when the state would order young men to join the Army in order to fight and kill an enemy, an exemption would be granted on religious grounds to those who believed it was a sin to kill anyone for any reason.

In recent years, however, the individual’s right of conscience has been challenged as a threat to the social order. Thus, the desire of a public official — or even a school valedictorian — to invoke the name or presence of God as a beneficent force in human affairs has been struck down as a harmful intrusion on the mental well-being of non-believers. (Why the failure of non-believers to acknowledge their debt to their Creator is not seen as a harmful intrusion on the mental well-being of believers is never explained, of course!)

And most dangerously, it has now been determined by court after court that Christians or any other believers do not have the right to practice their faith in their daily life if it interferes with secular laws. Thus legislators have required believers to swear allegiance to the state at the cost of their obedience to God.

Examples abound of this perfidy: Pharmacists who are forced to fill prescriptions for abortifacients despite their religious belief that abortion is murder. Bakers who have been forced to close their businesses because they refuse to provide cakes for gay marriages that they believe violate God’s law. Business owners who are forced despite their religious and moral objections to offer health insurance that includes coverage for services they consider immoral, again including abortion.

Many of these cases are working their way through the court system now, and it will be up to the Supreme Court to rule whether or not Americans still enjoy freedom of religion or whether that precious liberty has been surrendered to a few loud-mouthed bigots who think they are entitled to live in a world where God is only worshipped behind closed doors.

Think about it. The American experiment in liberty, which crushed those very noxious religious strictures that were so common in the colonies, has now given way to a reverse intolerance that claims that anyone who is offended by a religion has a right to shut it down. Isn’t that exactly the condition that existed in Europe in the 17th century from which our ancestors fled in search of freedom?

How could the First Amendment’s guarantee that the state can never touch your right to freely exercise your religious beliefs somehow have been twisted today into a cudgel to be used to keep people of faith silent, afraid and in line?

That’s both a simple and complicated question, and one beyond the scope of this column, but there may well come a time when people of faith will either have to stand up or be shut down entirely.

The culture we live in no longer esteems the Bible, the Judeo-Christian ethos, nor the traditional values espoused therein — no matter how many people go to church on Sunday. That’s fine. Let everyone decide for themselves what they believe or don’t believe, but don’t try to stamp out belief by force, especially not using the power of the state that represents all of us.

Non-believers, who pride themselves on logic and rational thought, should have no problem with that premise, and believers should recognize the need to take an active role in defending themselves from any attacks that do occur.

Fortunately, there are just such defenders throughout society. People of faith are not timid people, but rather people of power and love and discipline, as Paul notes in his second letter to Timothy. They are urged not to be ashamed of their faith, but to cast out fear and do the right thing.

And although the mainstream media may not report it too often, sometimes the right thing does get done through the efforts of those who labor according to the “purpose and grace” of God. I

Such a one is Pastor Jeanette Golden of Hemphill, Texas, who late last month won her battle to display a Ten Commandments sign on her own property along State Highway 21. The state had first attempted to charge Golden for the right to display the sign, and then tried to remove it altogether.

When I first wrote about Golden last Easter, it was unclear whether she would be one more victim of the increasingly secular state, but with the help of the Liberty Institute, Golden prevailed against the state of Texas, and now private individuals have the right to display non-commercial signs under 96 square feet on their own property. This should have been an obvious principle under that other part of the First Amendment that refers to freedom of speech, but nothing is obvious when a court gets involved. Fortunately, this matter was resolved by the Texas Department of Transportation without a liberal judge having a chance to rewrite the Constitution.

Interestingly, Texas is also taking part in another legal case, but this time whole-heartedly supporting the right of a church to free speech. Indeed, Texas is one of 10 states taking the side of a small Arizona church as it defends its right to display the same size sign as politicians or special-interest groups get to have.

I’m happy to report that Montana’s Attorney General Tim Fox joined Texas, West Virginia and other states late last month in filing a “friend of the court” brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in support of the Good News Community Church of Gilbert, Arizona.

The town of Gilbert had passed a sign ordinance that placed restrictive size limits on churches and non-profits, but not on political signs or “ideological” signs, whatever they are. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals (speaking of liberal judges!) upheld the sign ordinance, but the church appealed to a “higher power” — the U.S. Supreme Court.

 As Attorney General Fox said in a press release regarding the appeal, “If the Supreme Court upholds the Ninth Circuit’s ruling, it would give governments, including the federal government, the authority to systematically favor speech about certain subjects over speech about other subjects. This would be a dangerous erosion of the rights that all Americans are guaranteed under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.”

In other words, it would be one more instance where government is more important than the people, and where certain people are more important than other people. The “dangerous erosion” has already begun, perhaps has already gone so far that there is no going back, but it is heartening to see a few modest efforts at erosion control in a world that more and more seems to be built on shifting sand.