"Kings shall be your foster fathers and their queens your nursing mothers" (Isaiah 49:23).
In today's America, a supposed religious neutrality is enforced by law, especially by a zealously secular judicial system. I question whether that was ever the intention of the Founders when they adopted the First Amendment to the US Constitution. Below is an extended quote from John Bannerman, in his book, The Church of Christ, in which he argues for the doctrine of the established church, as he knew in Scotland.
"I take it for granted, as a fact not to be disputed, that the state, in all its acts, is to be accounted a moral and responsible agent, as much as any individual that is a subject of it; and that, although not under law to man, the supreme power, or organ of the state, is under law to God. I take it for granted, further, that, in consequence of this responsibility to God, the state is bound, as the first and chief of its duties, to own His will, as embodied in the form of a supernatural revelation from Him, and, in its national capacity, to recognize the authority and the Word of God as its law. And now, with an inspired revelation from God in its hands, what is it that the state learns as to its own interests and duties? It learns, in the first place, the intimate and indissoluble connection between the interests of civil society and the interests of true religion; and that, to promote the wellbeing, or, rather, to insure the existence of the state, it is necessary to call in the aid of powers and influences which the state has not in itself. It finds that what is awanting [sic] in civil society for accomplishing the very end of its own existence, the Gospel alone can supply; and that, for the state to dismiss, as a matter foreign to it, the religious instruction and spiritual wellbeing of the people at large, is to forego the main instrumentality which God has put into its hands for securing the authority of law, for promoting the ends of civil government, [and] for protecting the rights and furthering the peace of society. All this is too plain to need illustration. Without some religion, no society on earth, it is admitted by all parties, could exist at all; and without the true religion, no society can exist happily. Law would cease to be enforced if it had to trust to punishment alone for its authority, without any higher motive to secure obedience to it; and justice between man and man could not be carried into effect if it had no hold upon the conscience and the moral sense of a nation. And can it be alleged that religion is a matter with which states, as such, have no right to intermeddle, when it, in reality, forms the main and only secure foundation on which the authority of state rests - the only sanction sufficient to enforce right and to deter from wrong in a community - the only force strong enough to ensure obedience and respect for law - the only bond that can bind together the discordant elements of human society, and give peace between man and man? To assert that it is no duty of the civil magistrate to care for the religion of the people is nothing less than to assert that he is at liberty to forego the chief or only certain stay of his own authority, and to disregard what is essential to his own existence or wellbeing. If religion be the great and indissoluble cement of human society, then the magistrate is bound, by a regard to his own interests, and for the sake of the grand objects for which a state exists at all, to make the care of religion one of the first duties he has to discharge towards his people." [emphasis in the original]
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