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Church And State Anti Separationism

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Overview of the principle

In the United States, separation of church and state is sometimes believed to be in the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and by legal precedents interpreting that clause, some being extremely controversial. The Establishment Clause states that, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;" However, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the Fourteenth Amendment (one of the Reconstruction Amendments) makes the Establishment Clause and other portions of the Bill of Rights binding on state and local governments as well, although it is arguable that this restriction on state and local government existed in Article VI of …show more content…

Anti-separationists also point to the fact that Thomas Jefferson was not in America during the constitutional convention, but in France as the American ambassador. This is supported by Federal Government decisions on the matter, such as Supreme court case Vidal v. Philadelphia, as well as Federal Government's past involvement in printing Bibles, and using the Bible as a textbook in public …show more content…

"Strongly guarded . . . is the separation between religion and government in the Constitution of the United States," Madison wrote, and he declared, "practical distinction between Religion and Civil Government as essential to the purity of both, and as guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States" (1811 letter to Baptist Churches). Ulysses S. Grant also called for Americans to "Keep the church and state forever separate."

The belief that religious and state institutions should be separate covers a wide spectrum, ranging between one extreme which would secularize or eliminate the church, and theocracy, in which the government is an affiliate of the church. Some secularists believe that the state should be kept entirely separate from religion, and that the institutions of religion should be entirely free from governmental interference. Churches that exercise their authority completely apart from government endorsement, whose foundations are not in the state, are conventionally called "Free"

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