A Threatening Danger

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Nov 21, 1912

A Threatening Danger

STATING in an introductory paragraph that “the Seventh-day Adventists are the stanch advocates of an absolute divorcement between church and state,” Tobias Schanfarber presents in the Chicago Israelite of November 9, an abstract of a recent address by Elder K. C. Russell in that city, which we reprint:—

“Let governmental recognition of religion once be established in this country and there will always be religious organizations ready to take advantage of it and turn the power and influence of government to their own ends. While statesmen have been absorbed with other problems, the enemy of the principle of the American idea of civil government has been sowing the tares of the union of church and state, which is destined to yield an awful harvest of religious intolerance and persecution.

“The leading organization which is proposing this wicked principle is known as the National Reform Association, and has its headquarters at Pittsburgh. Its purposes are crystallized in Article II of its constitution, which says, in part: “To secure such an amendment to the Constitution of the United States as will declare the nation’s allegiance to Jesus Christ and its acceptance of the moral laws of the Christian religion, and to indicate that this is a Christian nation, and place all the Christian laws, institutions, and usages of our government on an undeniably legal basis in the fundamental law of this land.’

“Such a declaration will by no means make all the people in the nation religious. It will produce faith in no one; nor will it increase by a single individual the number of Christians in the nation; nor will it give any guaranty or assurance that the rights and liberties of the people under it will be respected. Rather may it be taken for a signal of oppression.”

The following comment is made upon the position taken by Elder Russell:—

“Mr. Russell has certainly a correct conception as to what would be the ultimate outcome were the hopes of the National Reform Association realized. They would hurt and not help the growth and development of the nation. One of the elements that has helped this nation forward has always been the complete separation of church and state. No unholy hand should seek to form an alliance between them, and thus subvert the spirit of the Constitution and nullify much of that for which the fathers of this country fought and wrought.’”