If history teaches us any lessons at all, it teaches us that force applied to religion creates not a purity of faith but a river of blood.

- Edwin Gaustad

The first phrase of the First Amendment spoke to the freedom uppermost in Jefferson's mind when it provided that, 'Congress shall make no law respect…

- Edwin Gaustad

One seeks to know the self better in order to know God better.

- Edwin Gaustad

Jefferson found in the religion phrases of the First Amendment no vague or fuzzy language to be bent or shaped or twisted as suited any Supreme Court…

- Edwin Gaustad

In America, religious dissent is as vital as it is elusive. Like the secretions of the pituitary, the juices of dissent are essential to ongoing life…

- Edwin Gaustad

What good deed can government do for religion? The best deed of all: leave it free and unencumbered, burdened by neither enmity nor amity.

- Edwin Gaustad

Most of the founding fathers, sympathetic with and influenced by the European Enlightenment, saw religion - natural religion, that is - as a potentia…

- Edwin Gaustad