MAGA Doesn’t Need More RINOs

Written by Dr. Everett Piper

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court heard the case of St. Isidore v. Drummond, whereby Oklahoma’s attorney general, Gentner Drummond, is suing to deny Oklahoma parents the right to choose to send their children to a board-approved charter school with a 100% graduation rate and 98% of its students matriculating to college.

In a state where traditional public schools are ranked among some of the worst in the nation, why would Mr. Drummond, a man who pretends to be a conservative MAGA Republican, want to deny his constituents the right to send their children to this school? Well, in a nutshell, he says it’s because he believes in the “wall of separation between Church and State.”

At the risk of being a bit pedantic — after all, Mr. Drummond has a law degree and should know all this — a little refresher course on what this “wall” is might be helpful here.

In 1791, James Madison wrote the First Amendment, stating,

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

In writing these words, Madison’s argument was simple: Congress has no authority over a citizen’s religious beliefs, and no governing body has any say about how anyone “expresses” their faith. In other words, Congress and the courts should leave the church alone and never presume to tell us what to believe, how to practice our religion or how we can or cannot pass our faith on to our children.

In 1802, the newly elected president, Thomas Jefferson, wrote a letter to reassure a small group of Christians in Danbury, Connecticut, that the government was obligated to stay out of their business. “I contemplate with (utmost) reverence,” he said, “that [the] legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.” The point of Jefferson’s analogy was unmistakable: There is a wall protecting the church from the state, and no elected official or government bureaucrat should presume to breach that barrier.

Now, you should immediately notice that Jefferson’s “wall” is not a prison but a fortress. It’s there to protect people of faith, not to confine them. America’s third president no more thought this fence was built to restrain the church than he believed the one around his own home was built to restrain him. He was telling those who were worried about government overreach into matters of their religion that, in America, there is a legal barrier protecting the church from the state and that it is built for the believer’s benefit, not the government’s.

The bottom line is this: The “wall of separation” that liberal RINOs like Mr. Drummond seem to so dearly love, especially when they want to use it as a cudgel to gain more power over the people they pretend to serve, was never intended to be hostile to religion.

Jefferson made this explicitly clear when he said, “No nation has ever existed or been governed without religion — nor can be. The Christian religion is the best religion that has been given to man, and I, as Chief Magistrate of this nation, am bound to give it sanction.”

John Adams agreed. “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people,” he said. “It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. … Without religion, this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite company.”

One hundred years after that, Justice David Brewer, who served on the U.S. Supreme Court at the time of Oklahoma’s statehood, said,

“[We are] a religious people. This is historically true. From the discovery of the continent to the present hour, there is a single voice. … We find everywhere a clear recognition of the same truth … that this is a Christian nation.”

Finally, lest there be any confusion, Theodore Roosevelt, whose ideas were instrumental in crafting Oklahoma’s fledgling constitution, added:

“The teachings of the Bible are so interwoven and entwined with our whole civic and social life that it would be literally impossible for us to figure to ourselves what that life would be if these teachings were removed.”

Mr. Drummond is not content with being Oklahoma’s attorney general. He is now running to be governor. Why would one of America’s “reddest of red” states want such a “Republican in Name Only” to be its chief executive? My land, the man gave $1,000 to Joseph R. Biden in 2020 and then blamed his wife for making the contribution when he got caught. What kind of a man does this?

The last thing MAGA needs is another “Republican” governor who agrees more with the worldview of Bernard Sanders, David Hogg and Gavin Newsom than he does with Jefferson, Roosevelt and Donald Trump.