Letter: Criticism of religious values is off base

Friday, Dec. 21, 2007 | 7:23 a.m.

Columnist Roger Cohen's attack on Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee and the "new American religiosity" is unwarranted ("Romney cuts out nonbelievers," Saturday's Las Vegas Sun). Cohen is shocked that these candidates have religious values and express them. So? Cohen fallaciously connects contemporary expressions of faith to the religious slaughter in Europe during the Reformation.

The bloody religious conflicts in Europe were over by the time America was founded. But in 1793 the blood being shed was on the guillotine, when extremists worshipped the Church of Reason but executed clergymen and other innocent victims. And let's not forget the utopian communists who persecuted religion and annihilated millions to construct a new world.

President Jefferson did not share Cohen's snide attitude toward Christians. In fact, Jefferson's famous line about separation of church and state is best understood when read in the context in which it was written. He was writing to members of the Danbury Baptist Association in Connecticut on Jan. 1, 1802. The Baptists were upset that their "religious privileges" as a minority sect were regarded by some as "favors granted, and not as inalienable rights." Responded Jefferson:

"... Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man & his god, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of the 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 ...

"I reciprocate your kind prayers for the protection and blessings of the common Father and Creator of man, and tender you and your religious association, assurances of my high respect and esteem."

America's Christian heritage is evident in Jefferson's letter. The founders did not establish a preferred Christian sect, like the Anglican Church in England, but neither did they show hostility toward religious citizens.

William Donati, Las Vegas