Is ‘Separation of Church and State’ Really a Myth?

Last updated on: July 5, 2026 at 8:53 am by Barbara O'Brien

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Is ‘Separation of Church and State’ Really a Myth? 2026-07-05T08:53:15-05:00 Barbara O'Brien

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Beware the Religious Liberty Commission

Recently, President Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission issued a report that declared that “separation of church and state” is not in the Constitution. But I’m sure James Madison would beg to differ. Madison was the chief author of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights. He left us a wealth of writing that made it clear he most certainly intended church and state to be kept separate. “Religion and Government will both exist in greater purity the less they are mixed together,” he said.

It’s true that the exact words “separation of church and state” do not appear in the Constitution. They are usually attributed to Thomas Jefferson, who used the phrase in 1803 as a metaphor to illustrate a phrase in the First Amendment to the Constitution. The Amendment begins, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” 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.” And I’ve written about this in more detail before; see Jefferson’s Wall of Separation Between Church and State. Jefferson and Madison were close political allies who shared a common view of religious liberty.

“Establishment of religion” refers to the practice of making one particular religious tradition the official religion of the nation. This was a common practice in Europe when the Constitution was written. It’s still found in some countries, such as Great Britain. In the 18th century, the “established” church benefited from receiving tax dollars and also often had access to the King and a say in government policy. And citizens were often required to attend the established church, even if they might have preferred another. Madison, Jefferson, and many of the other founders wanted to avoid any possibility of the government coercing citizens into religions they didn’t freely choose for themselves. In the new country they were founding, religion was to be a matter of personal conscience for every citizen.

In more recent times, courts have interpreted the Establishment Clause to stop the government from even favoring one religious tradition over others. The “separation” metaphor was never intended to banish religion entirely from public life in the U.S., but it has come to mean that government must treat all religious traditions with fairness, and without favoritism.

What the Religious Liberty Commission Says

The Religious Liberty Commission has taken the view that “separation of church and state” is not supported by the Constitution, no matter what Thomas Jefferson thought. In their “draft report” which you can read here, they describe religious liberty as “The Bridge Between God and Government.” This suggests they are defining “religion” strictly as monotheism. As a Buddhist, I disagree. Elsewhere I found that the Commission hopes “to ensure that all Americans of all faiths, from Christians to Jews to Muslims to Sikhs to Hindus are able to approach God freely, to worship him fully and to live out their faith without governmental interference.” I’m not sure how Hindus feel about “approaching God.” But show me any monotheist in the U.S. who is being prevented by government from approaching God freely. Or “living out their faith,” for that matter, as long as that faith doesn’t require them to break laws or interfere with the religious freedom of others.

Then the report says “Religious liberty is understood as the proper allocation of authority between religion—both individual beliefs and public, communal religious practices—and government power.” Do they want religious institutions — but only the monotheistic ones — to share authority with the government? What authority, and over whom? And what if your personal preferences, including atheism, don’t recognize the authority of religious institutions that are not of your choosing? What happened to religion being a matter of personal conscience? Further, I read that “for us actually to have liberty, we have to allow religion to be utterly free.” Utterly free? No restrictions whatsoever? I’m not sure they’ve thought this out.

The Religious Liberty Commission’s Dishonest Report

Through a highly cherry-picked account of religious history in the U.S., the Commission argues that separation of church and state didn’t really become a thing until the 20th century, when the Supreme Court began to issue decisions that (according to the Commission) restricted religious liberty. Like what? Do read the text under the subhead “Building Walls of Separation between Church and State” on page 41. The text rants ominously about a foreign philosophy that rejected God and even declared “God is dead” — which Nietzsche did not intend to mean literally, but let’s go on. Then this evil foreign philosophy seeped into the brains of Supreme Court justices.

This way of thinking made its way across the Atlantic Ocean to elite American academic institutions, through the courts, and ultimately into the American culture and courtroom. As a result, religious people gradually began to be pushed to the fringe.

Even a few Supreme Court decisions seemed to track with this train of thought, culminating in a 1947 opinion, in which Justice Hugo Black, a former Ku Klux Klan member, repurposed a metaphor coined by Thomas Jefferson in an attempt to legitimize the new critical philosophy by placing it in the constitutional tradition. Specifically, the Supreme Court ruled on a series of decisions in which it used the “wall” metaphor to regulate a child’s access to religious education and later to ban school prayer and public displays of religion (like the Ten Commandments).

The report doesn’t directly cite the 1947 case, but it was Everson v. Board of Education. I wrote about it here. I will quote myself here so you can see what’s being talked about.

The first landmark case that officially declared states were bound by the Establishment Clause was Everson v. Board of Education (1947). In this case a New Jersey taxpayer objected to tax money being used to help pay for buses for parochial school students. In the majority decision, Justice Hugo Black quoted Thomas Jefferson’s famous metaphor for the Establishment Clause, a “wall of separation between church and state.” Black wrote, “The First Amendment has erected a wall between church and state. That wall must be kept high and impregnable. We could not approve the slightest breach.” However, “New Jersey has not breached it here.” The majority said that transportation to and from schools was a benefit to the students and their parents, not to a church, so the state could continue to help pay for buses to parochial schools.

Note that the state of New Jersey did not prevent children from receiving a religious education in any way, and the school buses for parochial school children were still funded. But taxpayers are not obligated to see their tax money go directly to churches they don’t belong to themselves, which was the very issue Jefferson was writing about in 1803. The Religious Liberty Commission left that out.

Respecting Religion Means Respecting Religious Pluralism

We could go on and on, but the bottom line is that this report is dishonestly and deceptively written to make the case that religion — or their limited version of religion — is being prohibited by government. They mention prayers in public schools and displays of the Ten Commandments in classrooms, which I have also written about at some length before. In a nation in which people are supposed to be free to choose their own religions, or choose to avoid religion entirely, it is very difficult to allow religion into some environments without causing trouble with somebody. So many of the religion-in-school court decisions the Commission hates were brought by religious families who felt their children were being discriminated against by teachers and others trying to force their religious views on the children. For a particularly nasty example of how hurtful this can get, see Religion in Public Schools Hurts Religion (and Schools). In a Texas public school system, children of Catholic and Mormon families were being bullied shamefully by the Evangelical majority. I’ll just repeat a small part:

A seventh-grade teacher handed out fliers in class about an upcoming Baptist revival and then spent ten minutes of class time denigrating a Mormon student’s religion as a cult. There was one Jewish student in the district. Other students amused themselves by drawing swastikas on his notebook, giving him the Heil Hitler salute, and ultimately threatening to hang him. When the school did absolutely nothing to stop the harassment, his parents filed a separate suit. … Soon the prayers offered at football games and other school events were of such a sectarian nature that a Catholic parent objected to them at a public meeting. Someone else at the meeting yelled “Catholics aren’t Christians anyway.”

See also “They Haven’t Got a Prayer” by Pamela Colloff in the November 2000 issue of Texas Monthly.

I spent some years working in the textbook industry, managing the production of elementary and high school textbooks for public schools. One thing I learned is that you cannot mention religion in any way without infuriating somebody, and it’s usually religious people who are infuriated. For example, a respectful mention of Jesus will draw complaints that the text didn’t explain that He is the Only Son of God Who Saves Us From Our Sins. And I entirely respect that Christians believe that, but it’s strictly a Christian thing that people of other religious traditions don’t share. And a public school textbook is not supposed to be pushing just one religious perspective over others. So it’s easier to leave religion out of the textbooks as much as possible. And this infuriates some religious people also, but I say it’s really kind of their own fault.

Tolerance, Respect, and Peaceful Co-existence

What is the difference between tolerance and respect? I’ve heard it explained that tolerance is putting up with something you don’t like, but respect is seeing the value in something even if it differs from your own traditions and beliefs. The United States in the 21st century is a nation of enormous religious diversity. When the day comes that everyone can develop genuine respect for that diversity, and see the value in other faith traditions, maybe we won’t need separation of church and state. But we aren’t there yet. And in the real world, sometimes the only way all this diversity can co-exist is to insist that religion stays in its lane.

The Commission is determined to return teacher-led prayers to public school classrooms. But way back in 1962, we see in the Engle v. Vitale case that no prayer can be generic enough to be appropriate for all religions. New York school children were required to recite a very simple prayer — “Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our Country.” The prayer was challenged in court by Jewish parents, and the suit was joined by Unitarian and agnostic parents. And the Court ruled that the prayer violated the Establishment Clause — “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” The clause that Jefferson explained with the metaphor, “wall of separation between church and state.”

In the little town I grew up in, everyone was Christian. If there were any atheists, they were keeping their heads down. Hey, it was the Bible Belt. And the closest synagogue was about 60 miles away. So a teacher usually could lead a generic Christian prayer in class without any objections. But even a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer soon revealed the chasm between debtors and trespassers, which I remember causing contention among my classmates. And in a more diverse classroom, to say a prayer at all is a sectarian act. Note that the Religious Liberty Commission has been accused of being “a largely homogenous group” representing a narrow spectrum of Christian and Jewish beliefs. I question if most of these commissioners have any grasp of religious traditions other than their own.

James Madison Gets the Last Word

I’m coming back to James Madison, who was the chief author of the Constitution and the writer who composed the words “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” So one would think Madison knew what he meant. In Engle v. Vitale, Justice Hugo Black quoted James Madison:

“[I]t is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties. . . . Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other Religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other Sects? That the same authority which can force a citizen to contribute three pence only of his property for the support of any one establishment may force him to conform to any other establishment in all cases whatsoever?”

Clearly, he wanted to deprive the government of any authority to show favoritism in matters of religion. Only then would people be completely free to choose their own religious paths, without penalty or coercion. And clearly, the Religious Liberty Commission is promoting something else entirely. They want to fuse the authority of government with the authority of their own narrow slice of sectarian institutions. I, for one, will resist.