Church and State and Us Adult Sunday Class- with Becca Tweedie! – Starts Sunday, September 12

Almost anyone in America can tell you that “we have separation of church and state.” It’s much harder to articulate what that actually means, even for experts on church-state issues. Our Constitution provides that the state will not “establish” any religion, and that each individual shall have the “free exercise” of religion. But how much support can the government give to ensure that everyone can freely exercise their own religion, without actually establishing religion as a part of the state? What happens when my free exercise interferes with your free exercise? Can the state mediate those conflicts? And how do we deal with the fact that religious practice in America is far more diverse than the reference to “church and state” makes it out to be? We’ll talk about all of this and more in our next Sunday School series! Drawing from both philosophical and legal writings and our own experiences, we’ll explore what we mean when we talk about the U.S. as a secular democracy.