America’s founders sought to protect our republic from such conflicts in at least three ways.  They prohibited any government “Establishment” of religion, a state church such as the Church of England, or any laws that limited the “free exercise” of religion (U.S. Constitution, First Amendment).

The founders also prohibited any “religious test” for holding government office (U.S. Constitution, Article VI, Section III). Such “tests,” such as oaths of loyalty to a particular faith, have been used in other countries to exclude Jews, Roman Catholics, Protestants, atheists or others from positions in government.

(Karl Marx, e.g., was a grandson of rabbis, but his parents renounced their Jewish faith in order to hold a government job. Marx would go on to found his own religious cult, in whose name at least 100 million people were killed during the past century in what is probably history’s largest such bloodbath.)

In our time the political Left has attacked and tried to destroy each of America’s religious protections, our safeguards of human rights and religious liberty.

To understand this attack, let’s consider news reports about just a few of the battlefields and tactics socialists are using in this war between religions, between the Leftists who started this war and the Righteous.

Extermination.  New York City’s public (i.e., socialist) school system days ago directed that creche scenes depicting the nativity of Jesus be prohibited, as this column discussed and documented.  Cynically, New York City’s lawyers simultaneously declared that symbols of other religions, in particular the crescent-and-star of Islam and the Menorah of Judaism, by contrast had historical legitimacy and would be permitted in the same classrooms where Christian creches were banned. 

Similar attempts to purge creches, crosses, the Ten Commandments, the name of Jesus, Bibles, Christmas trees and other Judeo-Christian symbols and expression from the public square literally number in the thousands. For a thoughtful, well-documented introduction to this, read David Limbaugh’s current best-seller Persecution: How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity.

Mutilation.  “Mary Magdalene: Decoding ‘The DaVinci Code” is one of the stories bannered on Newsweek Magazine’s December 8 “Women of the Bible” cover. It discusses the current bestseller book’s speculation, based on non-canonical Gnostic writings, that Mary Magdalene and Jesus were intimate and that she might have born his child.

Where the Judeo-Christian tradition cannot be killed outright, the Left tries to damage, maim or mutilate it by raising speculations and doubts, the bottom line always being that the Bible is somehow untrue, incomplete or slanted (in the Magdalene matter, because feminist scholars argue that jealous men downplayed a woman more important to Jesus than was Peter, the disciple who became the first Pope).

A group of Biblical scholars calling themselves the “Jesus Seminar” have concluded that not a single statement attributed to Jesus in the Bible should be believed. Oh, they make one exception: a phrase about helping the poor, these Leftist scholars say, legitimately sounds like the “real” Jesus.  How convenient that the only words they accept from this founder of the world’s largest faith, after they have erased the context of everything else in the Bible, can be used to justify socialism. 

Jesus, like Che, is acceptable as a martyr, but only where and when he can be used as an icon for Marxist-humanist revolution.  Again we are reminded of the insight of Sir Peter Bauer: “By the year 2050 there will be only two true-believing Marxists left on Earth, and they will be two nuns in Brazil.”

Others have opposed SUVs by asking What Would Jesus Drive? (The answer, of course, is a Chevy Suburban with room to carry 12 disciples in comfort and loads of loaves and fishes with room to spare.)  Vegetarians ask: What Would Jesus Eat? (Answer: Fishes, as well as wine and the choicest victuals of sinners and tax collectors.) One Leftist minister even hijacked Jesus by using his name to support abortion.

Dilution and Distraction.   Some courts have declared that articles of Judeo-Christian faith such as the Ten Commandments can be acceptable in government venues, but only when co-mingled with symbols of other faiths. A creche may be okay if placed beside a Menorah. The implication, in accord with post-modern multiculturalism, is that all religions are equal, and all are subservient to the state.

During the Clinton Administration paganism was strongly encouraged as an alternative faith.  The military was directed to create pagan chaplains, most from the witchcraft or Wiccan nature religions of pre-Christian Europe.  The environmental movement became “godly” as well as green, embracing the ancient Greek “Mother Earth” pagan goddess Gaia. Feminists, too, embraced these pagan faiths in which god was feminine.  In Leftist Christian churches it became fashionable to refer to God as “She-He-It” and the “Mother-Father God,” and to urge re-translation of the Bible to remove its “patriarchial bias.”

Among the alternatives to “that Old Time Religion,” psychologists now report, is “Celebrity Worship Syndrome,” in which roughly one-third of people in Western societies such as Britain to some degree, large or small, vicariously devote and attach their self-identity, values, income and passion to the famous.

Such celebrities are mostly artists whose singing gets amplified on radio or in TV music videos, or whose face gets projected 40 feet tall on movie screens – today’s technological equivalent of being made “larger than life” by giant statues of the sort ancient Egyptian pharaohs erected of themselves.

The worship of great athletes dates back more than 2,700 years to the early Olympics in Greece, where onlookers believed that the winner in those sporting events was momentarily touched or possessed by pagan gods such as Nike, goddess of victory. Winning in the ancient Olympics was regarded as a mystical religious experience.

But some of today’s worshipped celebrities themselves have turned religion into mere style and kitsch.  Madonna, e.g., claimed a commercial trademark right to her first name, the Roman Catholic Church notwithstanding.  She used the crucifix as a fashion accessory and courted publicity by toying with the Jewish mystical teaching of the Kabbalah, trivializing and debasing things that for others over the centuries held ultimate significance and spiritual depth.  

(Even Cosmopolitan Magazine is expanding from hints about having orgasms to include its own “spirituality” editor and monthly feature, starting next February.)

Madonna gives the term “cult of personality” a whole new, shallower-than-ever meaning. But she has a practical excuse: it earns her millions. What do her hollow-headed worshippers see when they look in their mirrors?  Is anybody home in there?  Are they merely obsessed, or possessed?

UFOs provide an alternative faith for those who think themselves too sophisticated for more traditional religions. Think of E.T. phoning home, or of all the science fiction descriptions of extraterrestrials as being the origin of heavenly mythologies.  Others more recently have made a kind of religion out of the computer-generated alternative reality of the “Matrix” movies.

Kwanzaa is another concocted religion designed from the outset, its founder radical Black activist Ron Karenga has acknowledged, to promote collectivist ideas, comingle Marxism with anti-white racism, and lure African-Americans away from Christianity.

It has been honored with a U.S. postage stamp and given heavy support in public schools, unlike Judeo-Christian traditions.

Nowadays Islam is being promoted in many public schools, as this column recently discussed. Leftist humanists have no more desire to live under the moral constraints of Islam than under those of Judeo-Christian culture. But they seem to enjoy promoting

Islam as a way of bashing and undermining student belief in the West and its Judeo-Christian traditions.

Marxism clearly is a religion, claiming to hold the keys to human history and destiny and to aim towards the emergence of the “Crystal Man” purified from greed and other human evils in a future socialist world where Eden will be restored as neo-tribal utopia.

Science, too, has emerged as a religion substitute. It, too, claims arcane knowledge and power through its white-robed priesthood. But ethical scientists will tell you that they are limited to the empirical realm, physics but not metaphysics, facts but not capital-T “Truth.”  Most importantly, science deals in theories and open-mindedness – knowing that new evidence can revise everything they now assume. But scientists who follow Charles Darwin happily offer Darwinian explanations for other peoples’ religions.

Years ago the California Supreme Court upheld the teaching of evolution in public schools but with the proviso that teachers must explain to students that evolution is only a theory, a hypothesis that might someday be proven false.  The Democratic State Superintendent of Public Instruction went into near-screaming fits at this ruling, declaring that “Evolution ought to be taught as Truth!”

The California Justices were in this instance correct, and the partisan politician in charge of public education was both ignorant and wrong, just as his counterpart had been in Nazi Munich. But perhaps he had another agenda to serve, the agenda of the official statist religion and its long-term goal of eradicating all competing faiths.

This issue raises a tougher question than most people consider.  When Orthodox Jewish and Christian public school students are taught the theory of evolution in science class, the implication is clear: the government says that what you read in the Book of Genesis is WRONG! 

But if it would violate separation of church and state for a government school to teach that Judeo-Christian religion is true, then is it not equally a violation to teach that the Judeo-Christian version of Creation is false?  This cannot be remedied by merely adding a few words about “Creationism” or “Intelligent Design,” despite the merits of questioning evolutionary theory.  The only pure remedy is to move students from socialist schools to private ones freely chosen by the parents, to bypass issues of church-state separation by removing not the church but the state.

Other Gods.   Hanukkah, the “Feast of Lights,” celebrates a Jewish miracle through the lamp that remained lit for eight days with only a single day’s oil in the Temple reclaimed from Greek occupiers.  The invader, Syrian King Antiochus IV Epiphanes whose rule descended from a general of Alexander the Great, had in 162 B.C. committed the “Abomination of Desolation,” sacrificing an unclean animal, a pig, to the pagan god Zeus on the altar of the Temple in Jerusalem, thereby igniting a war he would lose to devout Jewish rebels.

Antiochus thought of himself as “modern” and “progressive.” It was traditional for Greeks, like most other pagans including the Romans who would invade the land later, to practice “tolerance” and “multiculturalism” by allowing all faiths to be practiced, so long as they were not subversive. Each cult or sect, however, was expected to exhibit social harmony by its own “welcoming” and “tolerance” by giving the idols of other cults token places in its temple.

Cosmopolitan Antiochus doubtless regarded the Jews as backward for insisting that theirs was the One and only true God. By sacrificing a pig to Zeus on their altar, he was delivering today’s “multiculturalist” message that all gods were equal…but that the Greek god Zeus of the rulers was more equal than all others.

Hillary Clinton committed a host of lesser abominations that evidence deep hatred of Judeo-Christian values. She endeavored to abolish the traditional Madonna and Child stamp issued each Christmas season by the U.S. Postal Service. (A postage stamp was issued shortly after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center honoring the Islamic celebration at the end of Ramadan called Eid, the name of which when reversed as some critics noted spells “Die.”) 

Hillary mocked Christianity one year with a private upstairs Christmas tree decorated, as one White House FBI agent described, with sex and drug paraphernalia.

She lobbied the government’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to create a new crime, “religious harassment.”  Akin to “sexual harassment,” it could have led to the massive fining and firing of managers who wore a crucifix or yarmulke or kept a Bible visible in the workplace or invited underlings to join in prayer or Bible study.

At the same time, she and congressional Democrats tried to enact laws that could launch ruinous lawsuits against any employers, including churches, who fired or refused to hire homosexuals.  The Boy Scouts, a private organization, came under intense Democratic attack because the group’s bylaws disallowed as scouts or scoutmasters those who were openly homosexual or atheist. In communities such as San Diego, Calif., Leftist judges directed that the Boy Scouts be denied their longstanding access to government property, ruling in that city that the Boy Scouts were a “religious” group.

Democrats routinely have given speeches and even taken up campaign collections in African-American churches. But after a small church in Valhalla, New York, criticized President Bill Clinton’s immorality, the Internal Revenue Service took away its tax exemption for involving itself in partisan politics. This, were it in a different ACLU context, would be denounced as government causing a “chilling effect” on free speech and free preaching.

This raises important questions.  Does such an exemption, designed to protect churches from a power to tax that gives government what Chief Justice John Marshall called “the power to destroy,” have the effect of putting churches under political control?  Of turning them into something like state churches, afraid to criticize government immorality? 

And how can there be separation of church and state when the IRS gets to decide who is and who is not a valid “church” that gets tax exemption?  Why should not Lowell Ponte’s Church of the Great Carrot get the same tax-exempt status as the Roman Catholic Church or the Church of Scientology (granted after years of court battles)?  Churches granted a tax exemption have a tremendous Darwinian competitive advantage and greater likelihood of survival than those denied tax exemption.

Those who say the Bill+Hill Clinton presidency did nothing to pursue terrorism are wrong. Through an operation known as VAAPCON, the Clintons directed intense government surveillance against “Christian terrorist groups” that criticized abortion. When this came to light, the Leftist press that usually screams whenever the U.S. Government spies on its citizens was remarkably silent about spying on Christian organizations and on then-Roman Catholic Cardinal John O’Connor of New York.

Clinton Press Secretary Joe Lockhart in 1999 described the Southern Baptist Convention as an organization that perpetuates “ancient religious hatred” – that the very Protestant denomination in which his boss Bill Clinton claimed membership was in effect a “hate group.”  Perhaps he knew that Clinton merely followed Machiavelli’s dictum that “the Prince must appear to be religious,” not actually be so.

In this spirit of deception, Leftist Democratic Presidential candidates in 2003 are trying to act religious before blue collar audiences.  The only one to do so outside of political campaigning is Senator Joseph Lieberman (D.-Conn.), although his religious views, in journalist Jeff Jacoby’s view, seem “tangled.”. But among the Leftist professoriate, a major reason journals such as The Nation give for defeating President Bush is his religious language and Christian faith.

One provincial Leftist court in Canada has already handed down a ruling that could ban the Bible from classrooms and other public places as “hate literature,” a precedent loony-Left judges might follow here. Canada has also preparing to enforce Sharia, Islamic law, in cases involving Muslims.

Recent Bush nominees to the Federal bench have been blocked by Leftist Democrats who used exotic rules to prevent any vote by the full U.S. Senate, votes blocked because the Bush nominees would have won solid bi-partisan majorities.

One of these nominees has been Alabama Attorney General William Pryor, a Roman Catholic. Another was former Clinton Justice Department attorney Miguel Estrada, a Roman Catholic.  In both cases Democrats demanded to know whether these Catholics shared the view of their church, which opposes abortion.

“Senate Democrats have now decided,” wrote author and radio talk host Hugh Hewitt, “that the privileges of serving on the federal bench will be denied to openly pro-life Catholics, which is to say faithful Catholics.”

This Leftist Democratic dogma that “No Roman Catholics Need Apply” does more than deny 65 million Americans, including most Hispanics, an opportunity to serve as Federal judges.  It also violates the “No Religious Test” provision (Article VI, Section III) of the U.S. Constitution.

By establishing such a de facto religious litmus test for judges, these Leftist Democrats are demonstrating a contempt for law and human rights rarely seen in our history.  These extremist Democrats seem to be returning to their party’s evil roots in the Ku Klux Klan, which preached hatred not only of African-Americans but also of Roman Catholics.

The two major parties have come to represent opposite polar positions in this religious war, as this column has documented.  Many non-religious people are Republicans, but the largest share of devoutly-religious people now tend to be Republicans. Many devout Jews and Christians remain Democrats, but the largest proportion of occultists, New Age cultists, humanists, agnostics and atheists now gravitate to the Democratic Party.  America’s war between religions has become a partisan political war.