Earlier this year Jon
Rowe told American Creation readers that Mark Hall has written a new book, "Did
America Have a Christian Founding? Separating Modern Myth from Historical Truth." After some delay, I have started reading Mark’s book that attempts to separate “modern myth from historical truth.”
When reading page 111, I found this line, “ Separationaists often think it
significant that there is no contemporary account of Washington saying ‘So help
me God’ when he took the oath of office.
<71> 71>
By flipping to page 199 I
learned that Mark has singled out Michael Meyerson as a separationist: <71>71> See, for instance,
Michael I. Meyerson, Endowed
by Our Creator: The Birth of Religious Liberty in America . . . ,
181-82.
I went ahead and tried to find out why Mark
Hall has thought it necessary to single out Meyerson as a “separationist.” When
I read the designated pages the only answer I could come up with is that Meyerson
is similarly trying to separate modern myth from historical truth, much like
Peter Henriques has done in his 1/11/2009 HNN article, So Help Me God”: A George
Washington Myth that Should Be Discarded.
I don’t know why Meyerson is
being identified as a separationist by Mark Hall, but the following snippet taken
from a 4/14/2014 Baptist Standard article, Revisionists
get church & state wrong, law professor (Michael Meyerson) says, by Ken
Camp & Daniel Wallace, should shed some light on the issue:
Equilibrium to avoid partisanship
The
founders sought to strike equilibrium on the issue and compromised to produce a
solution that avoided partisanship.
“They
understood the complexity of this issue better than we do,” Meyerson said.
“They understood the solution had to be nuanced and had to be complicated—not
beyond understanding, but not a simple ‘never or always.’ And that’s what they
worked on—that compromise.”
Founders
of the nation agreed on a respectful vision that religion is scarred with
unbelievable evil, yet also graced with equally unbelievable good, he noted.
Their goal was to formulate a standard on the issue of church and state
relations that united the nation, rather than creating a mandate that brought
division.
“They
wanted to separate church and state but not necessarily God and state,” he
said. “They were most afraid of sectarianism, but they never intended to
eliminate all discussion of God and religion from the public sphere.”