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Sarasota News Leader December 7, 2012 OPINION Page 62 TAKE A LOOK AT RELIGIOUS POLITICS: LEFT AND RIGHT, PAST AND PRESENT By David Staats Contributing Writer COMMENTARY Over the past several weeks, political pundits have autopsied the results of the Nov. 6 national elections and published their findings. Some findings perpetuate the myth that the failure of the GOP to win the White House was principally due to its surrender to the so-called "Religious Right," an amorphous group thought by detractors to be anti-scientific ("Creationist") and misogynic, among other things. Religion today exercises little influence over Western politics because church and state are firmly independent of one another. This was not always the case, of course. Until the late 18th century, church and state were closely allied. Religion was never the willing handmaiden of science. Early Christian cartographers dutifully drew maps depicting Jerusalem at the center of the world because God Himself had placed it there: "Thus saith the Lord GOD: This is Jerusalem that I have set in the midst of nations and countries that are round about her" (Ezekiel 5:5). The Protestant world was not different. England and her colonies in the New World refused to adopt the superior Gregorian calendar when it was introduced in 1582, believing it to be a Papist plot. They stuck with the less accurate Julian calendar until 1752. The role, controversial at times, played by religion in politics was no stranger to the Founding Fathers. All believed Christianity to be the best religion, now and forever, and adherence to it was desirable in order to maintain public morality as the primary social pillar on which good governance rested. They also believed in religious tolerance and the separation of church and state. Beyond that, however, their individual views on the subject diverged markedly from mainstream theology. Small wonder: They were revolutionaries. The "Religious Left"? George Washington was vague about his religious beliefs. Thomas Jefferson was not. He refused inclusion in any Christian denomination. Writing in 1819, he penned, "I am in a sect by myself, as far as I know." Jefferson Later, and under the Inquisition's threat of tor- disbelieved the Trinity, denied the Immaculate ture and life imprisonment, Galileo recanted Conception, doubted Christ's divinity and was his "heresy" of a heliocentric universe. skeptical of miracles.