Santorum’s Constituency of One

Over on our Evangel blog, Gayle Trotter has an interview with former Senator Rick Santorum :

GT: You think that President John F. Kennedy made a mistake about the role of religious faith in politics. What was his mistake?

RS: Senator Kennedy — he was a senator at the time — made his initial statement in his speech. He said, “I believe in an America where the separation of the church and state is absolute.” That is not an America that our founders would have understood. They believed that faith had a vital role in shaping and forming the discourse of our country. And that the provisions of the Constitution which were put in place to prohibit the establishment of religion, were put in place to protect faith from government, not to protect government from faith. And Kennedy went on and used the phrase that Thomas Jefferson had used in his letter to the Danbury Baptists, but that letter was written some eleven years after the Constitution had been ratified, and by the way, Jefferson wasn’t even involved in the writing of the Constitution. He was overseas at the time. But Jefferson wrote that in response to a letter from the Danbury Baptists who were concerned about the state interference with their faith and the practice of their faith. And Jefferson wrote that there was a wall of separation between government and the faith to protect the faith, to protect believers. And what Kennedy did was turn that on its head.

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