What wall of separation?
First a quick civics lesson. The section of the Constitution that deals with religion is Amendment I of the Bill of Rights the first 16 words of it, anyway. There’s the “Establishment Clause” (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”) and the “Free Exercise Clause” (“or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”). The “Establishment Clause” that’s the one today’s courts almost always focus on simply prohibits the federal government from “establishing” a national church, or from interfering with the established churches in the states! (Remember, several states already had state-supported “establishments of religion.”) Possibly you wonder whether the issue is really this cut-and-dried. After all, for the last half-century, judicial activists on the Supreme Court and lower courts, ACLU lawyers, the press and the secular culture in general have embraced “the constitutional separation of church and state” as though it actually existed somewhere in the Constitution. O
