Dear George,

It's been a slow week, so I figure I'll put my two cents worth in on God and the Constitution, church and state, and all that jazz.

I'll have to address this issue eventually in a paper that I will have to write at the end of the semester anyway, so I might as well throw around ideas comparing church and state in France and the U.S., the two oldest Republics in recent history to emerge from the revolutionary ideas discussed during period of the Enlightenment in the 18th century. One knows that the Founding Fathers could have made a theocracy out of the States, but they didn't. Why? To preserve religious freedom would be the short anwser. We only need to look at a country like Iran or Sudan to see why a theocracy wouldn't have worked.

France, on the other hand has been laïcal (independent of state religion) since the French Revolution. The new République wanted to sever all ties with the idea of a state religion to the extent that they invented a new calendar completely independent of the Gregorain calendar used by the Catholic Church which was used in many Western European countries at the time. Of course, as we all know, there have since been several coup d'états, wars and invasions which brought about temporary interruptions in the République Française, but it has always taken pride (especially now - they promote this in my classes at the Institut) in the fact that there is no correlation between any religion and the state, including schools. One will never hear a discussion over school prayer, because there is none, and it doesn't bother anyone, even though 80% of the country is Catholic (while only 20% of this number practice). You will never hear Président Jacques Chirac say "God Bless France" and you will never see the word "God" on any of the money. The only time any type of religion was promoted in the recent history of France was during the reign of the Vichy puppet government during the extreme right-wing Nazi occupation between 1940 and 1944. The puppet leader of Vichy, Marechéal Péatin, promoted family and religious values in what they called "la Nouvelle Révolution Française". The Catholic Church was given specail privelages under the Vichy Government. This, of course, was simply a Nazi brainwashing technique that they attempted to use on the people of France (thank God they didn't succeed, or WE'D probably be speaking Deusch right now) as a sort of excuse to murder Jews. One can learn from this epoch in history, however, that government imposition of one way of thinking for everyone to follow (Fascism) in the state does not work for humanity. We are too diverse for that Idea to work.

Place closing, gotta go. Talk to ya soon,

Joseph Cheek (electronic mail, January 19, 2001)