I have always been a stalwart defender of the separation of church and state. I’d like to say that it’s because I come from a 400-year-old religious heritage symbolized by Roger Williams stomping through the snow in what became the smallest of these United States. However, it’s more likely that it’s because I couldn’t spell Deuteronomy on my fourth-grade spelling test.

Fourth grade was a memorable year for me. Vivian Baily was my teacher, and when she wasn’t being my teacher, she was being my mother’s best friend. I’d come home from a tough day in the fourth grade and find my fourth-grade teacher sitting there talking to mother. I blame Mrs. Baily for my first nervous breakdown.

In addition to the usual subjects, we had to memorize all sixty-six books of the Bible and be able to spell them properly. Some of them weren’t a problem; Ruth, Job, James, John, Jude and a few others. Some were moderately difficult, such as Corinthians and Ephesians. And some were just a bear, especially Ecclesiastes and Deuteronomy. In a house where failure was not an option, I was on the verge of breaking new ground.

It didn’t seem strange at the time. Every morning we had a devotional, and then we went around the room, letting each student recite a memorized Bible verse. “Jesus wept” was so popular that Mrs. Baily finally banned it, giving me my first experience with censorship.

Then we’d have prayer. Throughout all of this, one of our class members would get up and go stand in the hall. If I’d been smarter, I would have considered this my first glimpse of the problem in mixing public school and religion. But I wasn’t. It was only later that I realized that mixing church and state is largely about exclusion.

I did misspell Deuteronomy (and probably several other Bible books) on the spelling test, although I did write all sixty-six of them in order. It was duly reported to my parents, and I expected to hear a lot about it, but help came from an unexpected source. My dad wasn’t given to expressing strong opinions on much of anything, but he made an exception in this case.

When the subject came up, he told mother that Mrs. Baily should leave that to the Sunday School and teach us what fourth graders needed to know to get to the fifth grade. While he was all for Sunday School, he wasn’t for mixing Sunday School curriculum with public school curriculum.

As I grew older, I found that dad’s position was very wise. Anybody who looks at the history of established religion can see that when religion and politics get together, politics doesn’t get more spiritual or religious. However, religion gets a lot more political. And when it does, religion doesn’t concentrate on what I understand our faith should do, but attempts to impose its will on others.

For instance, in the fourth grade we learned that the Pilgrims came to the New World to find religious liberty. There were persecuted in England because they were not part of the “in” religious crowd. So they got on some very small boats and fled. As soon as they landed, they declared themselves the “in” crowd, made people pay taxes to the church, and generally tried to get everybody to behave like their concept of a Puritan. So Roger Williams stomped off in the snow.

The thing that brought this meditation on is the current fire storm regarding same-sex marriage. I contend that whether you’re for it or against it, arguing Bible verses is not pertinent. The Bible doesn’t dictate public policy (or shouldn’t) any more than the Koran. However, the Constitution does guarantee my freedom of religion, which means that if I am opposed to same-sex marriage, I don’t have to go out and marry a guy. Having been married to the same person of the opposite sex for 55 years, I don’t really worry about that a lot.

And this latest brouhaha brings out once again the biggest problem with politico-religion (or religio-politics). It’s always more about what I can cause someone else to do (or not do) than it is about the way I live my life, which means that if I’m busy setting myself on fire because I don’t like what somebody else is doing, I’m not doing what Christ commanded. If anybody is still wondering what that is, just check out Matthew 25:32 and following. Not a word about what I made somebody else do or kept them from doing.