Doug Wilson

I'm in favor of separation of church and state everywhere.

But I can say that it's not an unconstitutional idea.

At the founding, the majority of the states had a formal relationship with the Christian faith, overwhelmingly so.

And I simply want to return to that.

One of the striking things is that in 1892, there was a Supreme Court decision, and this was over a century after the founding.

In 1892, there's a Supreme Court decision called Holy Trinity versus the United States, which is a funny name for this court case.

Holy Trinity was a church in New York.

And so they had hired a British minister and had paid his passage over, and that was against the law, and some zealous prosecutor went after them.

The Supreme Court...

decided in favor of the church in a common sense way.

Okay, that's not it.

But then Justice Brewer said, while we're on the subject, let us remind you that the United States is a Christian nation and has been since its founding.

And then Justice Brewer went through the history of the United States and showed over and over and over again how we were a Christian nation.

Now, that was in 1892, all right?

Now, that means that when I was born, 1953,

The day of my birth was closer to that Supreme Court decision than the day of my birth was to our conversation today.

It wasn't that long ago.

So we were and understood ourselves to be a Christian nation.

And this was common knowledge up until the Second World War.

And after the Second World War, federal courts started quietly insinuating that the wall of separation that Jefferson referred to in a private letter was somehow the way it was at the founding, the separation of church and state.