Public Cooperation Is Not One Church of Thought.
There are fundamentalists who claim they are the only Christians and that the Constitution mandate against the establishment of a church only bars the government from controlling their churches. They insist that the government is obligated to abide by the church law of their own sect whichever one it is. Actually, the ban against an established church has precedent in the intertwining of church and state in the history of Europe during the middle ages. Every facet of life was controlled either by the church or the state, and one enforced the authority of the other. There was no room for independent thought. So when pagan knowledge was brought back from the Middle East by the Crusaders, there was a Renaissance of thinking and culture that allowed people to question everything about life. The king's religion was continued through the Protestant Revolution, but the Enlightenment that came with the Renaissance still separated peoples' religious thought from their secular though...
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