THE GREAT WALL

I enjoyed Terry Eastland's fine review of Darryl Hart's A Secular Faith ("God's Politics," Nov. 6), but I have a nit or two to pick. Quoting Hart, Eastland writes, "'Christianity separated what the Old Testament bound together.' In time Christianity, via Protestantism, stimulated questions about 'whether church authority extended to all the spheres of life implied by the Holy Roman Empire.'"

The result of that questioning was "'to reduce the Church's sway over European society'--which is commonly known as 'secularization.'" But Protestantism's quarrel was with the Roman Church, especially that of the Medici popes of the early 16th century. "Throne and altar" had become conflated after Constantine. The European monarchs were linked to the Roman church. English Protestants had no doctrinal quarrel with Henry VIII.

The great urge to separate church and state took its momentum from the Enlightenment, culminating in the French Revolution's virulent anticlericalism. One may recall Denis Diderot's vividly gruesome promise to "strangle the last aristocrat with the entrails of the last priest." Neither the anticlericalism of 17th-century Europe nor the secularist dogmas of the Enlightenment took deep root in colonial America, where 9 of the 13 colonies had more or less established religions. The clergy supported the Revolution, and General Howe complained after Bunker Hill of having also to fight the "black regiment" of Protestant clergy.

It was the purpose of the First Amendment's opening clauses to prevent the national government through Congress from choosing a national church from among the various establishments of religion already in place. Separationist impulses only came into prominence with the nutty jurisprudence of the late 20th century.

One might plausibly argue that the strength of the Christian religion in America today is owed to the tolerance emanating from free exercise by so many competing Christian sects, rather than to historically recent separationist impulses.

JIM ANDREWS
Port Royal, S.C.

BREAKFAST EMBED

MICHAEL YON, whose artful mastery of modern battlefield storytelling has won him many loyal readers around the globe, has hit the nail squarely on the head with "Censoring Iraq" (Oct. 30). As a former public affairs officer currently serving as an operations officer in Afghanistan alongside Afghan and coalition members every day, I am routinely surprised at how little media coverage there is of this front of the war. Newspaper editors back home have explained to me that there is a bit of "war fatigue" going on right now with the American people. The sooner we focus on winning these campaigns and getting a much more comprehensive portrait of what is happening explained to those back home, the sooner we can get back home to enjoy some of that well-earned "war fatigue" ourselves.

MAJ. ARNOLD V. STRONG
Kabul, Afghanistan

IT SEEMS THAT many journalists, unlike Michael Yon, are looking for American scandals in order to implicate the Bush administration, so one can't blame the military for being suspicious of journalists' motives. For example, a CNN employee has just stated that the way the network obtained a terrorist video was by telling the enemy that they would be given a "fair shake." During war, I'll take "no news" over smears of our fighting men.

DEANE PRADZINSKI
Highland, Calif.