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Thursday, November 16th, 2023

Speaker Mike Johnson calls separation of church and state ‘a misnomer’

Author:     Ed Pilkington
Source:     The Guardian (U.K.)
Publication Date:     Wed 15 Nov 2023 | 08.45 EST
 Link: Speaker Mike Johnson calls separation of church and state ‘a misnomer’
Stephan:  

Johnson is incorrectly informed, willfully ignorant. The separation of church and state was a very big deal to the Founders. Pennsylvania and Rhode Island were states founded on the basis that the national government and the state were separate. Franklin, jefferson, and Madison, particularly felt very strongly about this. We have an ill-informed religious fanatic as the Speaker of the House.

The Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, said in a TV interview: ‘The separation of church and state is a misnomer.’ Credit: Michael Brochstein / Sopa Images / Shutterstock

The speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, has delivered his verdict on the separation of church and state: it is a “misnomer”.

The second-in-line to the presidency informed Americans on Tuesday that their time-honored conception of one of the founding principles of the country was a “misunderstanding”. Speaking to CNBC’s Squawk Box, he tried to turn the conventional wisdom about the founders’ intentions on its head and claimed what they really wanted was to stop government interfering with religion, not the other way around.

“The separation of church and state is a misnomer,” the speaker said in an interview with the TV channel from the US Capitol. “People misunderstand it. Of course, it comes from a phrase that was in a letter that Jefferson wrote. It’s not in the constitution.”

Johnson was referring to Thomas Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptist Association of Connecticut, written in 1802 […]

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