When I read the letter to the editor beginning with the claim "The reason many individuals flocked to America in its founding days was to pursue freedom from religious persecution. Founders worked diligently to protect the rights of the individual, especially in regards to religion..." ("Equating Religion," Oct. 20), I was expecting to read a rejoinder along the lines of: "at least, that is what they wanted me to believe in grade school. Now that I have started attending Mr. Jefferson's fine University, I have awoken from my dogmatic slumber and realized that what I was taught is patriotic nonsense."
Unfortunately, the letter failed to display what I would expect to see from a University student - namely, critical thinking and informed argumentation. One need only spend a few minutes of research to realize that the first colonies had little interest in protecting "the rights of the individual, especially in religion." In fact, for many colonists, exactly the opposite was the case. The New England colonies were founded with the intention of establishing a theocracy. In Virginia, Roman Catholic practices we legally banned and observant Catholics (or, the "popish" as they were derogated) were disfranchised until Jefferson's "Act for Establishing Religious Freedom" in 1786. Indeed, far from our modern ideals of "tolerance," nonconformity was severely punished in the early settlements. The legal sentence for being a refractory Quaker in Virginia 1659 was "banishment on pain of death."
Contrary to the assertions of the letter, that fact is, in America we do "tell people what they should believe." We always have. In Virginia, under the mandate of Sir Thomas Dale, all citizens were required to attend church and be catechized by a minister. Now, we have replaced "church" with "school" and call our catechetical examinations the "Virginia Standards of Learning" test. Nevertheless, the basic principle remains the same - mandatory indoctrination. Given the fact that the majority of students admitted to University are ranked among the top of their high school class, what is most troubling about the letter is not that the author did not do her homework; it is the recognition that she probably did. I can only pray that after obtaining a degree from one of America's best public universities, the author in question will have learned to see through the ideologically-driven mythology with which our youth are inculcated and will leave Virginia with a more "enlightened" perspective.
Peter Kang\nCLAS '06, GSAS IV
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