Responding to the passage of the Alabama anti-abortion law, Democratic presidential candidate Kirsten Gillibrand made a religious freedom argument. “One of the tenets of our democracy is that we have a separation of church and state, and under no circumstances are we supposed to be imposing our faith on other people,” she said. “And I think this is an example of that effort.” There may be many problems with the Alabama law banning abortion but violating separation of church and…

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Thousands of Americans protested for religious freedom — and some gave their lives. Here are a few that we know about. These descriptions are excerpted from Sacred Liberty Mary Dyer By modern standards, Dyer was no groovy freethinker. Like many of the other Puritans who came to America seeking religious sustenance, she was a serious Bible-following Christian (how else to explain her naming her son Mahershalalhashbaz, after a line in Isaiah 8:1?). But at twenty-five, she fell in with a…

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The hostility toward Mormons in the second half of the 19th century was intense, and often focused on polygamy. The small type on the sword and rifle indicate “The Only Sure Way” that Uncle Sam can rid us of the “mormon vermin.” The small type says, “Heroic Measures” and “Extermination.” This one is hard to get one’s head around. Mormons were consider, well, not white. This was partly because they embraced polygamy, which was viewed as Asiatic or African. In…

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Look closely: those crocodiles coming ashore to eat the children are actually Catholic Bishops!  The boy standing bravely on the beach has a Holy Bible sticking out of his coat. A gutted building behind them is labelled Public Schools.  What’s this all about? In the 1870s, when this Thomas Nast cartoon was published, Protestants were aggressively casting Catholics as anti-Bible.  The reason: the Catholics resisted having their kids forced to read the King James version of the Bible (instead of…

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