Bubo Sibiricus Encounters A Religious Conservative 
          And Is Pleasantly Surprised

I got to reading up on Roger Williams and Anne 
Hutchinson (again) and I had stumbled upon a web 
page by some guy named David Cloud.  He apparently 
is a Fundamentalist Baptist preacher in Michigan 
with a large library of self-written works.  If you 
listen to the the Religious Right evangelicals, you 
will get the schpiel time and again that this is a 
"Christian Country" and even some that will insist 
on the endorsement of Christianity as the official 
religion of the United States, so far as to even 
sign it into law and persecute those who are not 
(e.g., Dominionism, a completely scary philosophy. 
You might call it American Talibanism).

Those of us in Rhode Island with even a passing 
familiarity of the history of religious freedom here 
know this is absolute BS.  Reading some of Roger 
Williams' writings and even just reading George 
Washington's letter to the Touro Synagogue one gets 
clued in where all this "separation of church and 
state" comes from.

So anyway, I saw David Cloud's web page on the 
history of Baptist persecution since the Protestant 
Reformation through the founding of the Colonies. So 
I emailed him, asking his view on the idea of a 
"Christian Nation."

While I have browsed his other writings and disagree 
with him totally on much of his views, he's one of 
the ones who "gets it" from the same point of view 
as Roger Williams.

And thus his reply to me:

Date: Sun, 20 Jun 2010 
From: David Cloud <dcloud@wayoflife.removethis.org> 
To: bmo@entropy.tmok.removethis.com 
Subject: Re: Roger Williams, Conscience, Freedom of 
Religion

Hello. Thanks for taking the time to write. I have 
visited most of the sites in New England pertaining 
to church history, including those you mentioned. As 
for church and state, I believe that each should 
mind its own business, but the church can preach to 
the State and should be given the liberty to do so. 
America was never a Christian nation. There is no 
such thing from a biblical perspective. D. Cloud

----

Yeah, he "gets it."