Did you know that the authors of the old Soviet Union constitution used the phrase “separation of church and state,” and the U.S. Constitution authors did not? It’s true, dust off your copy of the U.S. Constitution and read the First Amendment: ”Congress shall make no law regarding the establishment of religion nor prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
The phrase “separation of church and state” was used twenty years after the writing of U.S. Constitution, by Thomas Jefferson in a letter to the Danville, Virginia Baptists, consoling and encouraging them that the government has no Constitutional right to meddle in the workings of the churches, hence “separation of church and state,” no taxation of churches, and no government dictation of content to be uttered from the pulpit is allowed, hands off.
And as the First Amendment says “Congress shall make no law……,” that means that each individual state government (if any would so choose) is free to establish an official state religion for their state, as confirmed by Supreme Court Justice, Joseph Story, who was appointed to the bench by the architect of the First Amendment, James Madison, and who founded the Harvard University Law School in 1817. He said that “the whole power over the subject of religion is left exclusively to the State governments, to be acted upon according to their justice and the State Constitutions.”
He wrote this in 1833, long after Jefferson had also re-affirmed the intent of the First Amendement to the Danbury Baptists in 1802, so the the record of how our Founding Fathers saw the relationship of religion to government is plain to see: free exercise of religion, no national laws regarding an establishment of religion, and the states’ right to establish an official religion for their state if they so choose.
Of course, states could not discriminate against those not of the ostensible official religion of that state, the official recognization of a religion on a state level would be more of a statement (no pun intended) regarding the general religious view of the people of that state, a statement of faith by the people of that state, fully allowable under the First Amendment, according to Madison, Story, and many others.
So the constant bludgeoning of the people of faith by media types who worship at the altar of secular humanism should be corrected in a moment’s notice when they get halfway into their specious “separation of church and state” line, the notion “worked” in the old Soviet Union, but is anathema to the U.S. Constitution.
