Reply #63: It might be a good assignment

[Alcibiades]

for a college freshman, though I'd also make it clear that they could turn it around the other way, if they wanted. Not to overgeneralize, but many people in America today, to include, apparently, this teacher, don't seem to realize that this country is a creation of the enlightenment. If it had been me, I wouldn't have actually written an essay in response, except to use just enough text to string together a series of quotations from Voltaire, Jefferson, Franklin, and the other luminaries of the Enlightenment. The argument has already been made, three hundred years ago. Today's Republicans are the same people who would have supported those who wanted, but didn't get, an established church in America. The irony of this is that many of them are Baptists, who wound up supporting the side of the deists and freethinkers in opposing such a thing, because it probably would have made the US a permanent part of the Anglican church.