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BuzzFlash interview: Susan Jacoby
Author of Freethinkers reminds us of America's proud tradition: 'religious freedom from government interference...and government freedom from religious interference'

...leaving God out of the Preamble to the Constitution – it was revolutionary. There had never been a government that legally separated church and state before, and it was very deliberate. The omission of God from the Constitution was debated at all of the state ratifying conventions about the Constitution before and when it was finally ratified.

And the Christian right at the time – the right-wing ministers – were very opposed and predicted that God would smash America for leaving Him out of the document. And by the way, this was a division then, too, between conservative and liberal religion, not only between conservative religious people and freethinkers, because religious dissidents also supported the separation of church and state strongly in the Constitution. And indeed, it was a coalition of freethinkers – of people like Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine – and dissident Evangelicals – Baptists, for instance, who were then the minority religion in most states, who joined in this coalition to support the separation of church and state. How far we have come from that....

...We really need to think about this not in terms of any contrast with the sixties, but in a much larger time frame. And I think the difference now, and why George Bush is a really unique figure in American history, is there have been lots of Presidents who were devout believers in God. But there has never been a President, before, who set himself up as the leader or the spokesman for one religious faction in the country.

And I think a really good comparison in terms of attitudes toward God and the role God plays in public rhetoric and public decisions really is with Abraham Lincoln. He talked about God a lot. And one of the points he made over and over again was that both Northerners and Southerners prayed to the same God supposedly -- but the Northern God told the people in the North at the time that it was right to go to war to end slavery, and the Southern God told Southerners that God Himself supported slavery, and it was their right to go to war to uphold that divinely inspired institution.

And right there is the quandary and the dilemma and the wrongness of citing God as a final authority for public policy, because what we all know is that whatever one believes about God, God speaks to people in different voices, and darned if that voice usually isn't the voice of what we already think.

That's the problem of citing God as a justification for capital punishment or war. You close down any public discourse when you do that because, presumably, people who take their inspiration from their vision of God are convinced that they know the will of God. And even though their neighbor may know the will of a completely different God, you just – you close down any discussion, when God is appealed to as the sort of President-in-Chief....