LETTERS TO THE EDITOR: TV PROGRAM WAS NOTHING BUT RELIGIOUS PROPAGANDA

To the Editor:

We recently viewed a TV program shown on Ch.5 and titled "America's Godly Heritage." The program was produced by an organization named Wallbuilders. As was anticipated, Godly was an exercise in propaganda, not history. The narrator asserted that James Madison wrote the following: "All of our laws should be based on the Ten Commandments." There is not a single paper in the Madison Archives in which that statement, or a similar one appears.

There is, however, a paper in that archive that clearly expresses Madison's views on the relationship between church and state. This document is titled "Memorial and Remonstrance" and it was studiously avoided by Godly. Madison read his document to the 1785-86 Virginia legislature as part of his and Jefferson's effort to defeat the appropriation bill for the established Anglican Church. In his memorial Madison argued the following points:

(1) that a true religion did not need the support of law; (2) that no person, either believer or non-believer, should be taxed to support a religious institution of any kind; (3) that the best interest of a society required that the minds of men always be wholly free; and (4) that cruel persecutions were the inevitable result of government-established religions.

The appropriation bill was defeated and Jefferson's Virginia Bill or Religious Liberty was enacted. In a few years the disestablishment of the Anglican Church was completed.

Although both men were lifelong members of Anglican congregations, they were convinced that religious liberty could exist only in nations that had no establishment of religion or church.

Later in 1786 Jefferson received a letter from the Baptist Association of Danbury, Connecticut in which the Baptists expressed their gratitude for Jefferson's efforts to disestablish the Anglican Church from Virginia's state government. It was in a letter of reply to the Danbury Baptists that Jefferson wrote the following: "there must always be a wall of separation between church and state". The narrator of Godly did focus on that exchange of letters but then went on to get the historical details completely wrong.

Apparently the people of Wallbuilders are trying to wall off historical truths from their own created historical fictions.

ROBERT L. SMITH

Cape Girardeau