The Myth of
“the Separation of Church and State”
Probably the most destructive and profoundly evil falsehood ever perpetrated by government is the modern doctrine of “the Separation of Church and State.” Most Americans, having never read the Constitution, assume it is in there somewhere. It is not.
The “separation” myth is the idea that government must not be “under God.” Any government that will not admit that it must be “under God” is a government that thinks it is God.
The “separation” myth is the idea that the government must be atheistic, and religious views must be kept private. It is the denial that the government has a duty to acknowledge and obey God.
It means school children cannot be told that God says not to steal or kill. It means four thousand unborn babies are slaughtered every single day. Both before and after the ratification of the Constitution, America as a nation acknowledged its duty to be a nation “under God.” The modern Supreme Court has repudiated that duty, making America an officially atheistic nation. The Court claimed in ALLEGHENY COUNTY v. GREATER PITTSBURGH ACLU, 492 U.S. 573 (1989):
This is a lie, arguably the most important lie in American history. The justices who voiced it are too intelligent and too well informed to believe it. The best spin on the lie is to say that the Justices meant “The Constitution now mandates that the government remain secular,” i.e, “because we said so” {Latin: ipse dixit).
The Framers of the Constitution intended no such mandate, and never observed any such mandate. Just as all individuals have a duty to worship God, so do nations. America’s Founding Fathers honored that duty.
Never mind that every single person who signed the Constitution believed that America was and must always be a nation under God, and must always acknowledge its duty to God. The Court frankly admitted:
The Court has basically decided to re-write the Constitution and the First Amendment.
How to Interpret the Religion Clauses of the First Amendment
Here is the entire First Amendment:
Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Our focus is on the first part of the Amendment.
Not a single person who signed the U.S. Constitution intended to create a secular nation. From the beginning, America was a Christian nation, and the Founding Fathers did not intend to change this. Every single Signer of the Constitution believed the following:
- Christianity was the true religion, others were "false religions."
- Forming a civil government was a religious duty imposed by the God of the Bible, and hence all governments must be "under God."
- The God of the Bible answered the prayers of the colonists by directly and supernaturally intervening in human history, aiding their revolution against the British Empire to ensure American freedom. Not a single "deist" ("clockmaker god") signed the Constitution.
- It is the duty of all governments to endorse and promote the true religion, and make sure the statutes they pass conform to the Bible.
To correctly interpret the Constitution requires us to go back to the drafting and ratification process and read the document in light of the original intent of its drafters.
Any examination of American Constitutional history which is not weighed down with anti-Christian hostilities will discover the meaning of the phrase "establishment of religion." It had nothing to do with taking prayer and Bible reading out of schools. It had nothing to do with purging all public references to God and confining Christianity to the private recesses of the individual mind.
In 1963, before the current myth of "separation" had fully evolved, the Institute for Church-State Law of the Georgetown University Law Center published a study entitled Freedom from Federal Establishment: Formation and Early History of the First Amendment Religion Clauses
(Antieau, Downey, and Roberts, eds.). Their examination of the laws and controversies of
Colonial and Revolutionary America make plain that the First Amendment was designed to prohibit the following:
- A state church officially recognized and protected by the sovereign;
- A state church whose members alone were eligible to vote, to hold public office, and to practice a profession;
- A state church which compelled religious orthodoxy under penalty of fine and imprisonment;
- A state church willing to expel dissenters from the commonwealth;
- A state church financed by taxes upon all members of the community;
- A state church which alone could freely hold public worship and evangelize;
- A state church which alone could perform valid marriages, burials, etc.
Nearly all of these had been eliminated by all of the states before the Constitution was even drafted. Most of the changes came about after 1776: The Church of England had been the established religion in many states, and that was clearly no option after the Revolution. The First Amendment did not make radical changes, it protected what had already been achieved by the Revolution.
Nobody in America today wants one denomination to have legal privileges over another denomination. Nobody opposes the Separation of Church and State as the Framers understood it. Nobody.
Americans did not want the federal government coming to town and requiring all preachers to be licensed by the Presbyterian Church. James Madison, known as "the Father of the Constitution," thought he had precluded this possibility by creating the Constitution as a document of "enumerated powers." This is one of the most fundamental principles of America government. The federal government only has the power to do something if that power is enumerated in the Constitution. If it's not mentioned in the Constitution, then "We the People" did not delegate that power to the federal government. Since no power is given to the federal government in religious matters, Madison felt that was sufficient to protect the states. Madison actually opposed adding the Bill of Rights to the Constitution,
suggesting that the mention of specific problem areas might be used in the future to suggest that these limitations on the federal government and only these limitations existed, giving rise to new expansions of government. But when Madison realized the Constitution might not be ratified, and new Constitutional Convention called to begin all over again, he worked to create a Bill of Rights. In his speech to Congress the best he could say of a bill of rights was that it was "neither improper nor absolutely useless."
The First Amendment was demanded by the states to insure that they would continue to enjoy the freedom from Federal interference in religion and speech which existed before the Constitution was adopted.
In general, the purpose of the new Constitution was to give the Federal Government more power than it had under the Articles of Confederation. This granting of new power carried with it certain risks.
In a notable address delivered in support of his proposal, [Madison] stated that many Americans, "respectable for their talents and respectable for the jealousy which they have for their liberty," were dissatisfied with the Constitution as it stood because it "did not contain effectual provisions against encroachments on particular rights, and those safeguards which they have been long accustomed to have interposed between them and the magistrate who exercises the sovereign power."[1]
The States would not ratify the new Constitution without express guarantees of these rights.
The Framers of the Constitution felt no need to include in the original document a provision expressly upholding a general theory of freedom of speech, undoubtedly holding to the belief that the government they envisioned, limited to the enumerated powers, could not constitutionally enact a law in derogation of the principle of free speech. Popular pressure, however, demanded a more articulate expression of the guarantees of individual rights from governmental interference. This pressure culminated in the adoption of the Bill of Rights in 1791.[2]
In the view of the States, adoption of a new form of government meant uncertainty, unpredictability, and risk. The uncertain (the Constitution) was intended to be read in terms of the certain (The Bill of Rights, and is it pertains to this case, the First Amendment). Since no one can predict how a given provision of the Constitution might be used by the State, we chose to reduce risk by grounding all interpretation and application of Constitutional provisions upon the foundation of the First Amendment.
The idea that the First Amendment REQUIRES the federal government to interfere in religious issues at the state and local level is ludicrous.
This is why the U.S. Supreme Court was correct to say in 1892 that America is still "a Christian nation."
1. Pfeffer, Church State and Freedom, 126 (1967).
2. Nowak, Rotunda, and Young, Constitutional Law, 833, (1986). See also Pfeffer, above, note 1, at 126 ("The 'public clamor' for a bill of rights was so great that Madison and the other proponents of the Constitution could persuade several states to ratify only after promising to work for the addition of a bill of rights."), and J. Rutledge, dissenting in Everson v. Board of Education of Ewing Tp., 330 U.S. 1 at 39, 67 S.Ct. 504 at 522-23, 91 L.Ed. 711 at ___ ("[Madison] pledged that he would work for a Bill of Rights, including a specific guarantee of religious freedom, and Virginia, with other states, ratified the Constitution on this assurance [note omitted].").