Hi clo,
"This is the United States of America, Trump's outrageous plan goes against the foundation of why we left England."
- Not sure what you mean. Are you talking about the pilgrim fathers? They were an extremist English Christian sect who had no notion of freedom of religion or the United States of America. They just wanted to find some place for themselves and their Puritan version of Christianity that was far away from the easy-going religious ideas of the Netherlands, which had sapped the resolve of their congregation. The Puritans, in case you haven't followed their story, were a bit like the Wahhabis. Strict, intolerant and unpleasant. Famously, they stopped folks dancing around maypoles in England when they finally achieved power in the mid seventeenth century. Nevertheless, the pilgrim congregants remained English subjects and lived in an English colony which I believed they thought of as part of Virginia, named for an English queen!
- The first English settler to suggest freedom of religion from a seat of power was the Catholic Lord Baltimore in Maryland. But the other colonists stopped that from continuing as they thought Catholicism would undermine their society and its loyalties. An American precursor of the Trump model? Certainly, it gives the lie to the claim that English colonists were universally modern in their views of religious tolerance.
- The implementation of the ideas of religious freedom through the United States was carried out by the founders. They, of course, weren't leaving England as few of them had visited it.
- Maybe one cannot argue with mythology. But it is ahistorical to impute the ideals of religious freedom to the pilgrims.
- The avoidance of religious tests is a luxury afforded by the fact that we live in the post-enlightenment era of Christianity. Christians got out of the politics business for the most part. It is going to be interesting to see how well the ideal stands up to a religion that combines belief with politics and which requires a different set of loyalties than the nation state.
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