Christian nationalist pastor McPherson: "Empathy is aligned with hell."

Servus · Sunday at 6:54 AM

notyourenemy said:
Perhaps, but how many are getting governmental endorsement?

What federal, state, or local government formally funds, endorses, or officially supports Christian Reconstructionism?

o_mlly · Sunday at 7:13 AM

notyourenemy said:
Then what's going on here?

Tennessee House passes bill allowing Ten Commandments displays in public schools Tennessee House passes controversial bill allowing Ten Commandments displays in public schools

The First Amendment limits the federal government. Tennessee is a state.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

notyourenemy · Sunday at 7:50 AM

Servus said:
What federal, state, or local government formally funds, endorses, or officially supports Christian Reconstructionism?

Any state government which allows an overtly Christian display on public property while not giving the same deference to displays of other religions advances CR's agenda.

Servus · Sunday at 8:29 AM

notyourenemy said:
Any state government which allows an overtly Christian display on public property while not giving the same deference to displays of other religions advances CR's agenda.

You do realize displays like that have been around for over a century, right? The one in front of the old city hall building in the town I live in has been there for 70 years. It, like many others across the US, was donated by the Fraternal Order of Eagles. You're acting like this is some new sinister thing, when it's not. At this point it's an old tradition.

notyourenemy · Sunday at 9:10 AM

o_mlly said:
The First Amendment limits the federal government. Tennessee is a state.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

The Establishment Clause of the 1st Amendment is applicable to the states (Everson vs. Board of Education, 1947).

notyourenemy · Sunday at 9:14 AM

Servus said:
You do realize displays like that have been around for over a century, right? The one in front of the old city hall building in the town I live in has been there for 70 years. It, like many others across the US, was donated by the Fraternal Order of Eagles. You're acting like this is some new sinister thing, when it's not. At this point it's an old tradition.

Frequency of occurrence doesn't establish legality. Car theft is common; that doesn't make it acceptable.

Servus · Sunday at 10:12 AM

notyourenemy said:
Frequency of occurrence doesn't establish legality. Car theft is common; that doesn't make it acceptable.

That's a legitimate argument. Acting like it's something new isn't though. If anyone is to blame for it, it's the Fraternal Order of Eagles, and even Cecil B. DeMille to promote his movie. As for what's legal, that's up to the courts to decide.

o_mlly · Sunday at 10:12 AM

notyourenemy said:
The Establishment Clause of the 1st Amendment is applicable to the states (Everson vs. Board of Education, 1947).

The record says the opposite:

Facts of the case

A New Jersey law authorized reimbursement by local school boards of the costs of transportation to and from schools, including private schools. 96% of the private schools who benefitted from this law were parochial Catholic schools. Arch R. Everson, a taxpayer in Ewing Township, filed a lawsuit alleging that this indirect aid to religion violated both the New Jersey state constitution and the First Amendment. After losing in state courts, Everson appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court on purely federal constitutional grounds.

Question

Did the New Jersey statute violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment?

Conclusion

5–4 decision for Board of Education
majority opinion by Hugo L. Black

The New Jersey law reimbursing parents for transportation costs to parochial schools did not violate the Establishment Clause

A divided Court held that the law did not violate the Constitution. Justice Black reasoned that the law did not pay money to parochial schools, nor did it support them directly in anyway. It was rather enacted to assist parents of all religions with getting their children to school.

Justices Jackson, Frankfurter, Rutledge, and Burton dissented.

notyourenemy · Sunday at 11:21 AM

Servus said:
That's a legitimate argument. Acting like it's something new isn't though. If anyone is to blame for it, it's the Fraternal Order of Eagles, and even Cecil B. DeMille to promote his movie. As for what's legal, that's up to the courts to decide.

Right. It's up to the courts.....not state legislatures. It has nothing to do with how old or new it is.

notyourenemy · Sunday at 11:32 AM

o_mlly said:
A divided Court held that the law did not violate the Constitution. Justice Black reasoned that the law did not pay money to parochial schools, nor did it support them directly in anyway. It was rather enacted to assist parents of all religions with getting their children to school.

Justices Jackson, Frankfurter, Rutledge, and Burton dissented.

"Although the Court did not completely incorporate the First Amendment until Everson v. Board of Education (1947), when freedom from the establishment of religion was included, the court moved rapidly in the direction of applying the same protections for freedom of speech and the press under the 14th Amendment as are understood to be guaranteed by the First Amendment."

Incorporation of the First Amendment | The First Amendment Encyclopedia Incorporation of the First Amendment

Everson was when "freedom from the establishment of religion was included". Putting a sectarian display on public property has nothing to do with getting children to school.

o_mlly · Sunday at 11:42 AM

notyourenemy said:
Everson was when "freedom from the establishment of religion was included". Putting a sectarian display on public property has nothing to do with getting children to school.

? So "Everson" says nothing as to the unconstitutionality of Tennessee's statute.

essentialsaltes · Sunday at 12:39 PM

o_mlly said:
? So "Everson" says nothing as to the unconstitutionality of Tennessee's statute.

The important point is that SCOTUS considered the First Amendment to apply to the states. This particular law, they ruled, didn't violate the First Amendment, but they were clear that the First Amendment applied to the case and had to see whether it had been violated.

In other words they didn't say "Tennessee wins because states don't have to obey the First Amendment." They said "Tennessee wins because this law doesn't violate the First Amendment (which the state does have to obey)."

notyourenemy · Sunday at 1:30 PM

o_mlly said:
? So "Everson" says nothing as to the unconstitutionality of Tennessee's statute.

The Tennessee statute is obviously unconstitutional. The state government is using public property to promote a particular sectarian tradition.

o_mlly · 2026-02-16T06:41:31-0600

notyourenemy said:
The Tennessee statute is obviously unconstitutional.

Nope.

A federal appeals court appeared receptive to allowing Louisiana and Texas laws requiring displays of the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms to take effect, signaling a potentially significant shift in how courts view long-standing precedents governing the presence of religion in schools.

Full Appeals Court Signals Openness to Ten Commandments Classroom Laws

The full 5th Circuit seemed sympathetic to unblocking two laws requiring Ten Commandments displays.

www.edweek.org

notyourenemy · 2026-02-16T07:47:21-0600

o_mlly said:
".....a potentially significant shift in how courts view long-standing precedents governing the presence of religion in schools."

Shifts in court views do not change what the Constitution says.

" 'If the posted copies of the Ten Commandments are to have any effect at all, it will be to induce the schoolchildren to read, meditate upon, perhaps to venerate and obey, the Commandments,' said a unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, in New Orleans. 'This is not a permissible state objective under the Establishment Clause,' the provision of the First Amendment that forbids any government establishment of religion."

Federal Appeals Court Upholds Block on Louisiana Ten Commandments Display Law

Louisiana's law requiring the Ten Commandments in every classroom likely violates the First Amendment, a federal appeals court ruled.

www.edweek.org

Do you have a particular reason for believing that the Establishment Clause *shouldn't* be binding on the states?

o_mlly · 2026-02-16T07:59:52-0600

notyourenemy said:
Shifts in court views do not change what the Constitution says.

" 'If the posted copies of the Ten Commandments are to have any effect at all, it will be to induce the schoolchildren to read, meditate upon, perhaps to venerate and obey, the Commandments,' said a unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, in New Orleans. 'This is not a permissible state objective under the Establishment Clause,' the provision of the First Amendment that forbids any government establishment of religion."

Federal Appeals Court Upholds Block on Louisiana Ten Commandments Display Law

Louisiana's law requiring the Ten Commandments in every classroom likely violates the First Amendment, a federal appeals court ruled.

www.edweek.org

Do you have a particular reason for believing that the Establishment Clause *shouldn't* be binding on the states?

We'll see if Louisiana an appeal to SCOTUS is in the cards.

Applying the federal Establishment Clause as binding on states is a novelty and not traditional. The original colonies had distinctive religious affiliations for good reason, i.e., to establish community. A community is bound together by "commonalities" e.g., language and values. Religion being an important, if not the most important, value.

notyourenemy · 2026-02-16T08:47:26-0600

o_mlly said:
Applying the federal Establishment Clause as binding on states is a novelty and not traditional. The original colonies had distinctive religious affiliations for good reason, i.e., to establish community. A community is bound together by "commonalities" e.g., language and values. Religion being an important, if not the most important, value.

"The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries."
---James Madison, 1803

FireDragon76 · 2026-02-16T09:04:06-0600

o_mlly said:
We'll see if Louisiana an appeal to SCOTUS is in the cards.

Applying the federal Establishment Clause as binding on states is a novelty and not traditional. The original colonies had distinctive religious affiliations for good reason, i.e., to establish community. A community is bound together by "commonalities" e.g., language and values. Religion being an important, if not the most important, value.

Pennsylvania and Rhode Island were not bound together by "common religion" in the sectarian sense, but by a covenantal understanding of community that went beyond religious sectarianism. William Penn and Roger Williams were explicit about that. That's why so many Jews settled in Philadelphia, they had no laws persecuting Jews, and in the early years, much of Washington's army was bankrolled by Jewish moneylenders, some of whom lost everything financially backing the revolution.

The Quakers and Baptists were motivated by a distinctly Protestant Dissenter impulse, first articulated by Sebastian Castellio, that the true elect of God must reject using violence to coerce people into the correct doctrine, that love, not violence, was the basic grammar of reality, of the Kingdom. John Locke actually was deriving his ideas on religious freedom from thinkers like Hugo Grotius and Castellio before him, they didn't come out of nowhere.

What probably needs to be reclaimed is the sense of common good and basic natural law ideas that humanity exists in an implicit covenantal relationship with one another, that we aren't isolated individuals, not specific enshrining of sectarianism as normative, which will do no good and isn't consistent with the deepest impulses of the Christian tradition (going all the way back to at least Martin of Tours's critique of violence as the logic of the emerging Christendom).

o_mlly · 2026-02-16T11:38:56-0600

FireDragon76 said:
Pennsylvania and Rhode Island were not bound together by "common religion" in the sectarian sense, but by a covenantal understanding of community that went beyond religious sectarianism. William Penn and Roger Williams were explicit about that. That's why so many Jews settled in Philadelphia, they had no laws persecuting Jews, and in the early years, much of Washington's army was bankrolled by Jewish moneylenders, some of whom lost everything financially backing the revolution.

The Quakers and Baptists were motivated by a distinctly Protestant Dissenter impulse, first articulated by Sebastian Castellio, that the true elect of God must reject using violence to coerce people into the correct doctrine, that love, not violence, was the basic grammar of reality, of the Kingdom. John Locke actually was deriving his ideas on religious freedom from thinkers like Hugo Grotius and Castellio before him, they didn't come out of nowhere.

What probably needs to be reclaimed is the sense of common good and basic natural law ideas that humanity exists in an implicit covenantal relationship with one another, that we aren't isolated individuals, not specific enshrining of sectarianism as normative, which will do no good and isn't consistent with the deepest impulses of the Christian tradition (going all the way back to at least Martin of Tours's critique of violence as the logic of the emerging Christendom).

Most colonies did have an official state church and most colonists lived in those colonies -- about 85% of the half million non-indigenous inhabitants,

The Puritans’ Congregational Church was the established state church in New England. The Anglican Church was the established state church in the southern colonies. The tolerant middle colonies had a Christian pluralism of various Christian denominations.

In Penn's colony, one had to be a Christian to be a citizen or hold public office. Williams, a Puritan pastor in Salem, Massachusetts, was banished from the colony of Massachusetts for his dissident beliefs and in 1643 founded the religiously tolerant colony of Rhode Island. The colony became a refuge for religious minorities–Quakers, Catholics, Baptists, Jews, and Antinomians.

More importantly, all the colonies were distinctively Christian in their values with some advocating for freedom of religion by denomination. None advocated for freedom from religion to which we have devolved today. And none would have opposed a public display of the Ten Commandments.

2PhiloVoid · 2026-02-16T11:48:20-0600

o_mlly said:
Most colonies did have an official state church and most colonists lived in those colonies -- about 85% of the half million non-indigenous inhabitants,

The Puritans’ Congregational Church was the established state church in New England. The Anglican Church was the established state church in the southern colonies. The tolerant middle colonies had a Christian pluralism of various Christian denominations.

In Penn's colony, one had to be a Christian to be a citizen or hold public office. Williams, a Puritan pastor in Salem, Massachusetts, was banished from the colony of Massachusetts for his dissident beliefs and in 1643 founded the religiously tolerant colony of Rhode Island. The colony became a refuge for religious minorities–Quakers, Catholics, Baptists, Jews, and Antinomians.

More importantly, all the colonies were distinctively Christian in their values with some advocating for freedom of religion by denomination. None advocated for freedom from religion to which we have devolved today. And none would have opposed a public display of the Ten Commandments.

........... let's not forget that tarring and feathering was commonly practiced in several early American colonies, particularly in Massachusetts and Virginia, during the 1760s and 1770s. It was often used as a form of vigilante justice against tax collectors and loyalists.

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