Religious Freedom Day is Jan. 16. For several years I have been urging people to celebrate America's religious freedom: We can worship (or not) where and when we choose, we don't pay taxes to support religion, and there is no (official) religious test for office in America.

This separation of church and state was essential for Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and for 18th century evangelicals. Those evangelicals, mostly Baptists and Presbyterians, believed that separation guaranteed better government and purer religion -- mixing them corrupts both. This principle, stated so elegantly by Jefferson in the Virginia Statute for Establishing Religious Freedom adopted in Richmond on Jan. 16, 1786, and incorporated in the First Amendment of the Constitution, is, in theory, embraced overwhelmingly by Americans.

I think Ragosta is right on both counts:  That evangelicals of the 18th century were all about religious freedom and disestablishing the official state churches; and that most Americans of today, given a chance to know what is at stake, would or already do share the values embraced by both atheists like Thomas Paine, deists like Jefferson, and Baptist evangelicals like Isaac Backus and John Leland, and so many more.

History is powerful. And we really must not cede our story to the dominionist ambitions of the Christian Right.