Berkeley historian Ronit Stahl, in a 2022 interview, said, “ Many of the Founders — though I wouldn’t say all — were very concerned about religion as the guiding force for government . That wasn’t a critique of religion in people’s personal lives, but there was a wariness about what it meant … for government and religion to be fully interlaced.”

Those concerns have historical roots.

As early as 1814, Thomas Jefferson warned in a letter to the New York writer and inventor Horatio G. Spafford that, “in every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the Despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.”

More recently, in a 2004 column, J. Brent Walker, then-executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Reli

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