Former New York Times reporter John McCandlish Phillips has a delightful piece in Wednesday's Washington Post in which he indicts a number of commentators, but particularly the Times' Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich, and Paul Krugman for their super-heated anti-Christian rhetoric, their secularist paranoia, and their utter lack of historical understanding. He notes that there have been 13 opinion columns in the WaPo and the NYT in a one month stretch between March 24 and April 23 which have been of the "sky is falling and it's the Christians' fault" variety.
Phillips then closes with this:
It is said, again and again and again, that the evangelical/Catholic right is out of accord with the history of our republic, dangerously so. What we are out of accord with is not that history but a revisionist version of it vigorously promulgated by those who want it to be seen as other than it was.
The fact is that our founders did not give us a nation frightened by the apparition of the Deity lurking about in our most central places. On Sept. 25, 1789, the text of what was later adopted as the First Amendment was passed by both houses of Congress, and subsequently sent to the states for ratification. On that same day , the gentlemen in the House who had acted to give us that invaluable text took another action: They passed a resolution asking President George Washington to declare a national day of thanksgiving to no less a perceived eminence than almighty God.
That's president, that's national, that's official and, alas, my doubting hearties, it's God - all wrapped up in a federal action by those who knew what they meant by the non-establishment clause and saw their request as standing at not the slightest variance from it. It's a pity our phalanx of columnists cannot crawl into a time machine to go back and reinstruct them.
It's an outstanding column and we invite our readers to read the whole thing.