A cruel irony sits at the heart of Trump's holy war

When church and state overlap, brutality follows and justice bends with the whip. Blurred lines between religion and government produced the Spanish Inquisition, the Salem witch trials, the Crusades, the Huguenot persecutions, and the brutality campaigns of the Holy Roman Empire, to list an easy few, all featuring sadism, torture, and bloodlust in the name of religion.

The centuries have proved that entangling religious dogma with state power always leads to brutal oppression. That’s why founders of our republic...