The L.A. times has an op-ed by Jim Burkee today about the separation of church and state, as well as an editorial called “Santorum vs. JFK.” (You can find all of our Santorum posts dealing with this and other topics here)

Burkee made some good points about Santorum’s inaccuracies about JFK as well as how it would serve Christianity better to uphold the church-state wall:

Santorum was off historically by more than 150 years in his assertion that Kennedy was the first American president to advocate a wall between church and state. And his clear misreading of Kennedy’s statement also exposes a deeper misunderstanding by social conservatives of the exceptionalism of American church-state relations. [...]

Christianity does well when the state stays out of its business and allows this marketplace of ideas to thrive. Historically, it has thrived in the face of benign or even oppositional states, from Imperial Rome to modern China. And it’s strange that so many conservative Christians — people who typically defend a free marketplace and oppose government overreach — don’t get this.

When the state and religion become intertwined, religion suffers. [...]

[Churches that have nonprofit status allow] the state to place restrictions on what their pastors and priests can say. Christian colleges that accept federal aid subject themselves to similar restrictions. If you take state money, you risk federal involvement.

Burkee, an associate professor of history at Concordia University Wisconsin and the author of “Power, Politics, and the Missouri Synod: A Conflict that Changed American Christianity,” concludes that conservatives would be better off separating church from state because doing so maintains the vibrancy of American Christianity.

And isn’t that what they want? As if it’s not vibrant enough…

Taking it from there, the L.A. Times editorial suggests that Ricky Santorum should try imagining himself as Jewish, for example, or Muslim, before insisting that Americans do things his Christian way or no way. That might be asking too much from such a religious zealot who is so extreme that he declared that one of the most popular presidents in U.S. history, JFK, was the cause of his nausea:

Kennedy tried to reassure people of different faiths that their views wouldn’t be dismissed simply because they weren’t Catholic. Santorum is saying that religious people’s views shouldn’t be dismissed simply because they are religious. [...]

As a Christian, Santorum’s faith is comfortably within the American majority. But how would he feel about faith and government if he were Jewish or Muslim? Or more to the point, how would he feel about a community with a large Muslim population that elected a city council that decided to open its meetings with an Islamic blessing or adopted a few ordinances based on Sharia law? We suspect he wouldn’t be so sanguine about religion in politics in that case.

But thinking like that would take a rational, open mind, so…