Mr. President, please tear down this wall!

Posted: May 7, 2007 1:00 a.m. Eastern
By Chuck Norris
© 2007

Almost 20 years ago, on June 12, 1987, then-President Ronald Reagan spoke to the people of West Berlin, near the Berlin Wall. From there his now-famous words were amplified even to those in Communist East Berlin: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

Various walls have been erected and razed throughout history – some permeable and others impermeable, some ideological and others material.

A few of the literal ones are even now under construction – that which separates the West Bank and Israel, Baghdad's Sunni and Shiite districts, and the Mexico-U.S. border.

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Then there are those walls created by the minds of men. Among the host of them are the barriers between intelligent design and macro-evolution beliefs, pro- and anti-Iraq war views, and church and state relations.

A wall that morphs

The peculiarity of the wall that divides ecclesiastical and governmental matters is that it has changed through the past two centuries.

When Jefferson originally penned that legendary commentary on the First Amendment, "a wall of separation between church and state," in his letter to the Danbury Baptists (1802), he was concerned with prohibiting the domination and legislation of religious sectarianism in government, as it was back in England and even in some early colonies of Virginia.

However, he was not trying to rid government of Christian influence – a fact proven by his own proposal of biblical imagery for the U.S. Seal, endorsement of using government buildings for church purposes and the signing of treaties for federal monies to be used to support priests, missionaries and build churches on the western frontier.