HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT

HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT 

by Michael Peroutka                                    

Sometimes the simple, straightforward truth is hard to recognize.  Sometimes the answer is so patently clear that we just cannot see it.

For the past eleven weeks the churches in America have been ordered to remain closed under the threat of fines and punishments by civil government officials.

Some church services have been interrupted and some pastors have even been arrested for disobeying what Thomas Jefferson referred to in the Declaration of Independence as “pretended legislation”.

In some states, churches have sued, claiming they have been unfairly labeled as “non-essential” while, for example, abortion mills and liquor stores are supposedly “essential”.

And yet the most obvious legal argument for churches to continue preaching the Gospel, administering the Sacraments, and serving the spiritual and temporal needs of their members, without any interference or interruption from health department or other state personnel is…

Wait for it…

Separation of Church and State.

For at least seventy years, we have suffered through a long thread of Supreme Court cases which have served to subvert the original comprehension of the phrase that Jefferson included in his 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists.

But now, here before us, is the situation that the Baptists feared, and that Jefferson assured them would never happen.

There is a “wall of separation” between these two God-ordained jurisdictions.  And the Supreme Court has famously opined that the wall must be kept impenetrable.

So, the State has no authority over the church because there is a “SEPARATION of CHURCH AND STATE”

Amen.  (So be it.)

Sometimes the forest is obscured by all the trees that are in the way…

This is Michael Anthony Peroutka, for Institute on the Constitution, bringing you The American View.