Hello, welcome to a special edition of Politics by Faith.

I'm Mike Slater.

Thanks for being here.

So we are going to put here on this podcast some TV specials that we've done over the last year or so on the first TV that are especially relevant

to what we do here normally. I pushed for these religious themed specials and my bosses let me

and they're really good and I think you'll like them too. And I really wanted to start with this one. You have heard your

entire life, people say that there's a separation of church and state. Is there? Abortion, gay

marriage, transgender kids, whatever, all these cultural issues, whenever you bring them up, you hear people on the left say, oh, it's a separation of church and state.

You can't force your religion down my throat.

You hear all this, right?

So you can't have that opinion.

You can't enforce that policy.

You can't have that conviction.

There's a separation. You can't have that conviction. There's a separation. I'm sure you can't force

me to do anything. And even the title of our podcast, Politics by Faith, people push back on that.

Like, oh, what about the separation? It's like, no, you have it completely backwards. Truly,

you have it completely backwards. And that's what this special

is all about. We have a couple of guests coming up later as well. But the theme is where did this

idea of separation of church and state really come from? This is the story of this wall of

separation of church and state and how it's the exact opposite

of what people say it is today. And the story starts with Roger Williams. So let's pick up

the TV episode right here. He was born near London, 1602. He was against the Church of England, became a Puritan.

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