War on Christianity

Separation of church and state in the United States

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Separation of church and state" is paraphrased from 

Thomas Jefferson and used by others in expressing an understanding of the intent and function of the Establishment Clause and Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States which reads: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..."

The phrase "separation between church & state" is generally traced to a January 1, 1802, letter by Thomas Jefferson, addressed to the Danbury Baptist Association in 

Connecticut, and published in a Massachusetts newspaper. Jefferson wrote,

I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof', thus building a wall of separation between Church & State."

Jefferson was echoing the language of the founder of the first Baptist church in America, Roger Williams who, in 1644, had written of a hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world.

Article Six of the United States Constitution also specifies that "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States."

Jefferson's metaphor of a wall of separation has been cited repeatedly by the U.S. Supreme Court. In Reynolds v. United States (1879) the Court wrote that Jefferson's comments "may be accepted almost as an authoritative declaration of the scope and effect of the [First] Amendment."

In Everson v. Board of Education (1947), Justice Hugo Black wrote: "In the words of Thomas Jefferson, the clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect a wall of separation between church and state."

In contrast to separation-ism, the Supreme Court in Zorach v. Clauson upheld accommodation-ism, holding that the nation's "institutions presuppose a Supreme Being" and that government recognition of God does not constitute the establishment of a state church as the Constitution's authors intended to prohibit. As such, the Court has not always interpreted the constitutional principle as absolute, and the proper extent of separation between government and religion in the U.S. remains an ongoing subject of impassioned debate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_church_and_state_in_the_United_States

Comments

I believe Jefferson’s letter was merely his reassurance to the Baptists that Congress would never declare a “national religion” to endanger their particular denomination. But secular humanism did replace Christianity in the US to the delight of a hand full of atheists and the entire American Communist Party.

Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader