Separation of Church and State Home Page

A NOTE TO OUR CRITICS


This page has been in operation since January 1996. Since that time we've received e-mail from hundreds of people, split about evenly between supporters and critics.

We deeply appreciate the favorable mail we've received. It's great to know that so many people read our page and support what we do. At the same time, plenty of others have let us know that they think our views are muddled, wrongheaded, or otherwise incorrect. And that's OK with us; we want to hear from everyone that has an intelligent comment about our page, and our critics are nothing if they aren't intelligent.

All the same, over the last few months we've become perplexed at the content of our critical mail. Put simply, a lot of our critics seem either to misunderstand what separationism is all about, or else haven't read parts of the page that anticipate and deal with anti-separationist arguments. As a consequence, we spend lots of our time in correspondence either repeating positions we've already spelled out in detail on our page, or referring people to parts of the page they haven't read. Frankly, we don't think this is a good use of our time, so we've put together a FAQ-like document that deals with some of the arguments/criticisms that are most frequently made in our critical mail. Our hope is that this document can advance the discussion of separationism by clarifying where we stand on some important issues, and directing our critics to parts of our page that they need to read.


SOME ANSWERS TO FREQUENTLY ENCOUNTERED QUESTIONS/ARGUMENTS


Why do you refer to "Religious Right" as if it were a monolithic group? We're not all robots, you know. In fact, I'm not even a member of the religious right.


Calling the religious conservatives "extreme" is uncharitable/inaccurate/name-calling, etc.


Separationists want religion to disappear from the public square.


I have this quotation that proves that [name of a founder] rejected separationism.


What's wrong with a kid praying in school? What could you possibly have against that?


Christians are under attack in America. It's getting to the point that you have to hide your religion to be accepted in American society.

Well, that enought for now. We'll expand on this document sometime in the near future. Stay tuned for further developments.


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