For decades, the Republican Party has been catering to the far-right extremists. Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, is trying to get rid of the law that bars churches from participating in politics.
The Republican platform for 2016 says that they would like to make us a theocracy. It says:
“We support the public display of the Ten Commandments as a reflection of our history and our country’s Judeo-Christian heritage and further affirm the rights of religious students to engage in voluntary prayer at public school events and to have equal access to school facilities.”
An evangelical scholar, John Fea, wrote a column about this topic. He criticizes David Lane, a Religious Right activist who is trying to get clergymen to run for office.
Fea wrote:
“The Founding Fathers understood something about the role of clergy in American society that Lane and his Christian nationalist friends do not. Those who care for the soul have a ‘great’ spiritual duty that should never be compromised or tarnished by politics. This is why they thought that the ‘separation of church and state’ was important.”
Thomas Jefferson had this to say about preachers holding public office:
“[I] suppose there is not an instance of a single congregation which has employed their preacher for the mixed purposes of lecturing them from the pulpit in chemistry, in medicine, in law, in the science and principles of government, or in anything but religion exclusively … Whenever, therefore, preachers, instead of a lesson in religion, put them off with a discourse on the Copernican system, on chemical affinities, on the construction of government, or the characters or conduct of those administering it, it is a breach of contract, depriving their audience of the kind of service for which they are salaried, and giving them, instead of it, what they did not want, or, if wanted, would rather seek from better sources in that particular art or science.”
The Founding Fathers would not have allowed these Evangelicals to try and infiltrate politics. We should not allow this either. We can’t let Republicans take away our Democracy and replace it with a Theocracy.
Here is a video from Samantha Bee giving a history of the GOP:
Featured Image: Screenshot Via YouTube Video.
