Remember Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Puritan society in his novel, The Scarlet Letter? Poor Hester Prynne violated the laws of the church, which meant that she broke society’s laws, too. At the beginning of the novel, the reader joins Hester as she leaves the safety of the town prison and makes her way back into the society that jailed her. Reading the book for the first time in the 11th grade, I had a hard time understanding how, in a free society, the religion of one group could also form its judicial system. That makes the laws of God the same thing as the laws of man. Separation of church and state was also an 11th grade U.S. history lesson, so we students figured no more Hesters could be jailed for breaking the laws of her religion . Or so we thought. We fought a war 250 years ago to separate the colonies from a king who was not only ruler of the government but leader of the church. A quick walk through British history shows what a mess that ideal leads to: remember Henry VIII
Last night, I watched the final episode of the Netflix series, All the Light We Cannot See, based on the book by Anthony Doerr. It was fabulous, and I would heartily recommend to anyone with an interest in WWII or in history in general. The most salient thing about the series was that, even though it was set in the early 1940’s in France during the Nazi occupation, so much was relevant to our time. And the scary part is that the brutality of the Nazi soldiers towards those different than themselves and the blind allegiance that Germans had for a delusional and dictatorial leader smack somewhat of our own 2023 world. So we haven’t really learned a damn thing, have we? The Republican Party is led by a delusional and dictatorial leader that promises to retaliate against those that do not support him, if he is elected president once again. He declares that he will shut down the justice department, the state department, and any other institution that doesn’t fall in line with his dem