Frosty West’s letter (The World, Aug. 21) darkly implying the “I Want to Know” questioner was influenced by godless communism is sheer demagoguery and needs to be addressed.

The questioner had quite reasonably asked why public funds were being used to support an explicitly religious activity.

I have no quarrel with those of faith, nor with their good works, but Mr. West’s interpretation of our Constitution is redolent of the ongoing, orchestrated efforts by other would-be theocrats to infer Christian religious fervor in our founding documents and in those who wrote them. 

Serious (non-ideological) students of history know most of the founders were Deists, who embraced a far more ecumenical view of religion that did most Christian denominations, and while they wanted to protect religious freedoms, they were influenced more by enlightenment principles of science and reason than by the “revealed truth” of supernatural divinity and scripture.

The writings of those founders — endlessly parsed by true believers seeking support of their theory that we are constituted as a Christian nation — do indeed contain many references to God of which, again, the non-ideological student knows was much more a cultural convention of the times than of evangelical fervor.

I know this appeal to reason and reality is a quixotic exercise, as true believers are nothing if not determined, but we should keep in mind that, up until the time the Republican Party was successfully hijacked by fundamentalists during the Reagan administration, from the time of our nation’s founding until the 1980s, it was widely considered unseemly to inject one’s religious convictions into the public or political sphere. These beliefs were considered a private matter throughout most of our history.

Since the excesses of Jerry Falwell and his contemporaries, only the candidate who brays the loudest about his or her devotion to God now stands a realistic chance for election to any office at all.

Mr. West and his fellow theocrats are of course free to worship and believe as they wish but, no matter their protestations to the contrary, Thomas Jefferson summed up and clarified the views of our founders that there should be “... a wall between church and state,” and I say it is therefore unfair — and likely unconstitutional —that public tax dollars should be disbursed to directly support already tax-exempt religious institutions and activities, though others, including the Bush administration, may think otherwise.

Al Foster

Hauser