Our society is still trying to answer the question, do politics and religion mix? The first amendment of the United States Constitution reads, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion nor prohibit the free exercise thereof." What the first amendment is saying is that government should stay out of religion, but religious people can exercise their faith in the influence of public policy.

Over the past fifty years, lawmakers have misinterpreted the Constitution. We've majored in the first part of the amendment while abandoning the second part, and in doing so, we have disenfranchised the gospel, politically, socially, judicially, and culturally. Like a sponge with the water squeezed out, ours is a society with Jesus squeezed out, and we are living in a fifty-year experiment of building a nation without God. No prayer. No Ten Commandments. No sermon at graduation. No Sabbath. No respect for marriage. Those things may be contributing to factors to some of today's problems: We have massive teen drug abuse, school shooting sprees, social unrest, and an adolescent suicide rate up 350 percent since 1960.

A student commenting on our politically correct times, wrote a school essay on Thanksgiving. It read, "The Pilgrims came to these shores seeking freedom of you-know-what, so they could give thanks to you-know-who, so we, their descendants, could worship each Sunday, you-know-where." It's entirely ludicrous, eh? It's time to ask, cannot politics and religion mix?