Re: To clarify:

The fact that they are dropping Thomas Jefferson from the list of "enlightenment thinkers" should be enough to set off alarms; they will now relegate him to the role of merely the third president; the one who doubled the size of the U.S. with the Louisiana Purchase. They want to remove all mention of his role in the founding of this country and especially in writing the Bill of Rights. Admittedly, you must dig back for months to find all of this, which I did.

Did you take note of this:

"In what amounts to an in-between perspective, Daniel Dreisbach who wrote a book called Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation Between Church and State ues that the phrase wall of separation has been misapplied in recent decades to unfairly restrict religion from entering the public sphere Martin Marty, the University of Chicago emeritus professor, agrees. I think wall is too heavy a metaphor, Marty says. Theres a trend now away from it, and I go along with that. In textbooks, were moving away from an unthinking secularity. The public seems to agree. Polls on some specific church-state issues government financing for faith-based organizations and voluntary prayer in public schools consistently show majorities in favor of those positions."

Or this:

" Thomas Ratliff, a well-connected lobbyist, has squared off against McLeroy in the Republican primary and is running an aggressive campaign, positioning himself as a practical, moderate Republican. Im not trying to out-conservative anyone, Ratliff told me. I think the state board of education has lost its way, and the social-studies thing is a prime example. They keep wanting to talk about this being a Christian nation. My attitude is this country was founded by a group of men who were Christians but who didnt want the government dictating religion, and thats exactly what McLeroy and his colleagues are trying to do. "

The truth is, the "Wall of Separation" crowd has gone off to the other end of the extreme to where Faith matters not at all, even though it did for, many- obviously not all- of the Founders.

Jefferson wrote that "Congress shall make no law respecting...an establishment of religion" (including the Christian religion); they are now attempting to reinterpret that as meaning that Congress shall not institutionalize one Christian sect above another.

How do you know that their interpretation is incorrect? It seems to be that the above is an admission that the "Wall" thing is taking it to an extreme that was unprecedented when the FF's laid the growndwork for a new society.

The bare fact is that neither Washington nor Jefferson nor Madison nor Franklin were Christians; they were Deists.

Agreed. But you seem to be reinterpreting them as completely Agnostic or atheistic, and thats' wrong too.

Here's what I see happening:

RIGHT WING CHRISTIANS: "Jefferson carried a book around in his coat pocket containing the teachings of Jesus. Therefore he must have been a Christian."

LEFT LEANING SECULARISTS: "No, he only beleived in the moral teadhings of Christ, that are common to all people, not that Jesus was Divine."

But here's the problem: He believed in SOMETHING. He may not have bene an Evangelical Christian, but he was not a person who felt that God didn't exist or that faith in God played no role in piblic life whatsoever. Do you see the difference?

So what heppens when that is read through the lens of a compelte secularist?

Same thing that happens when read though the lens of an over-zealous Christian. It gets out of balance, and the applications follow.

I guess maybe that's my point in all of this: What you are seeing is push back that you have to expect when there' been such a strong attempt to push things the other way.