Most of us who live in the area recognize that the popular local store known as Cherokee Guns is fond of using its advertising as the sort of in-your-face provocations that are more or less “red meat” for the MAGA base that seems to be the store’s target audience.

See the above photo for a typical example. But give the Devil his due: no right thinking person wants to see religion setting the government’s agenda.

So “right on” Cherokee Guns — except don’t stop with sharia law. Keep a careful eye on the wayward Christians as well.

Because, as a quick glance at the news will tell you, there are few worse bad ideas in this current crazy and upside-down world of ours than the increasingly wanky and far-reaching attempts to force religion into our public lives, and by doing so compel us — heathen and heaven-bound alike — to take part in the worship of today’s god of choice.

In Murphy, North Carolina, after all, “In God we Trust” is chiseled in stone on our public buildings.

And here in the Bible Belt god isn’t Allah or any other holy or supernatural entity, however generous you may wish to be with your theology. Here God is Jesus. No other deity need apply.

With every passing day there are fewer and fewer of us left who can remember the days of yore — the pre 1950s — when pushing a religion onto others in public spaces was both a violation of recognized federal law as well as being arrogant and disrespectful of cultural traditions. It was thus taboo for government at every level of our society.

The concept of a “wall of separation between Church and State” was famously championed by Thomas Jefferson in his 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists. In that letter, Jefferson stressed the need to keep civil governance and religious practice in distinctly separate spheres.

And James Madison, the “Father of the Constitution,” drafted the First Amendment, which prohibits Congress from establishing a national religion and protects the free exercise of religion or the exercise of no religion for all citizens.

But ever since then a loud and aggrieved minority of Christian Nationalists and their equally loud and equally aggrieved sympathizers have been working overtime to undo those prohibitions or water them down — to make it seem acceptable to us to mingle religion and government — to have, in fact, a government sanctioned religion.

Too often, it’s clear, prohibitions against evangelization and proselytizing by government seem to be in increasing danger of becoming a thing of the past.

Let’s also be clear — though Cherokee Guns may have brushed past this fact — there is too often no discernible difference between Christian and sharia legality: Consider, as an example, the New Testament commandment in Luke, Chapter 19, Verse 27, where Jesus issues the order via parable, “Those enemies of mine who did not want me to be king over them — bring them here and kill them in front of me.”

Do we really want our government championing that sort of criminal brutality? Right-thinking, decent people would overwhelmingly not only say ‘no’, but ‘hell no’.

The beginning of erosion of the separation of church and state is usually traced to the Cold War when the “Red Scare” frightened our shallow public officials into adding (in 1954) “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance and adopt (in 1956) the slogan “In God We Trust” as the national motto.

And equally shallow and misguided politicians such as Donald J. Trump are still at it.

As recently as a few days ago, when addressing a crowd at the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s annual Road to Majority conference at the Washington Hilton hotel, Trump insisted that the “(radical left) want to resume the transgender mutilation of children, they want to restart the war on Christians and churches, and as you saw with the communists elected in New York recently … they want to completely destroy the traditional American way of life.”

He described recent election winners in New York — none of whom were Republican, one can’t help but notice — as “very troubling people” and claimed without evidence (his lazy and recurring modus operandi) that they “want to destroy our country, and they hate our country and our people.”

So here we are, in 2026, well positioned to resurrect the dumbed-down days of the mid 1950s with its Red Scare and breathless fear of “communists” in every nook and cranny of our beloved but besieged nation.

It would be well for us to pause at this point and recognize that the Ten Commandments, or any other part of the Bible, Koran or whatever so-called holy books we may want to hold up for evidence of ways to live our lives are unsound foundations for both law and everyday morality.

These old books, as countless scholars have long recognized, are nothing more than the product of bronze-age tribal values. They preach a cruel form of authoritarianism, insecurity, and outdated social values, including subjugation of women, and a love of slavery.

They are consequently incompatibility in a more modern era with true ethical, humanistic, and science-based reasoning that should be the goal of us all.

It’s not too late, but it may soon be unless we stand up to the misguided religious bullies who want to take away yet another of our freedoms — the freedom to choose our own religion or to choose no religion at all.

The misguided want to return us to the days of King Charles I of early 1600 England when the state-sanctioned religion was the “high church” Anglican ceremonies and no others. Backed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Charles I prohibited preaching outside the Anglican tradition and punished those who wouldn’t fall in line.

Disgruntled Brits fled across the ocean to a new world. Soon they were calling it the United States, and putting in place laws and customs that called for a strict separation of church and state that became part of the new nation’s founding charters.

Let’s not forget our history.