Separation of Church and State: Overview

Introduction

The establishment clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion . . . “) and the free exercise clause (“or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”) provide a sparse framework for the proper relationship between the US government and religion. These two clauses have been a source of controversy since the First Amendment, along with the rest of the Bill of Rights, was adopted on December 15, 1791.

The establishment clause has been interpreted to mean that Congress and other government bodies are prohibited from designating a national religion, legislating the practice of religious activity, or endorsing any particular religious expression. The establishment clause is also understood to be the basis for the principles that the church and state should be separate, with neither one influencing the other, and that personal religious beliefs should be protected. The effort to maintain this independence over the years has resulted in court cases, legislative debates, and electoral battles.

In the twenty-first century, there have been renewed challenges to the concept of separation of church and state. Some have sought for government to uphold and protect religious faith, or even for greater direct integration of the two. Others maintain that a strict separation between government and religion is necessary to ensure impartiality and fairness.

Understanding the Discussion

Disestablishment: The removal of special status for a state church.

Established church: The church designated as the official church of a nation is the established church or state church. The established church is supported by the taxes of all citizens. Often, certain privileges, such as public office, are restricted to members of the established church. For instance, the English monarch must be a member of the Church of England, and a Spanish monarch must be a Roman Catholic. Sometimes, adherents of religions other than the established church suffer restrictions or even penalties.

Establishment: When a governing body designates a specific church as the official national church, the government is said to have established the church.

Religious liberty: A condition that exists when there is no established church and no religious test as a qualification for public office. All religions are considered equal and may freely conduct their activities, including proselytizing (winning converts to their faiths).

Religious test: The requirement that a person must be a member of a specific religion to qualify for public office or other position.

Secular: Not relating to religion; worldly.

Secularist: A person who argues that the United States was founded as a secular nation.

Separationist: Someone who supports the separation of church and state.

Theocracy: A state in which the clergy has official status in advising the government.

Tolerance: When a government allows religions other than the established church to exist without interference, that government is practicing religious tolerance or religious toleration.

History

Separation of church and state is a relatively new concept in the world of politics. Before the settlement of the British colonies in America, religious tolerance was rarely practiced in the Western world. Until the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation, European nations were predominantly Roman Catholic. During the Reformation and the devastating religious wars that followed, subjects of each country were expected to adhere to the same religion as the country’s ruler. Those who did not were routinely persecuted, tortured, or killed.

This atmosphere of religious intolerance contributed to some religious groups immigrating to the American colonies to set up their own societies. However, in many cases, these colonists imposed their own strict theocratic systems. For example, the Massachusetts Bay Colony established a Congregationalist theocracy and imposed severe penalties for Quakers, Catholics, and Baptists who ventured into the colony. These penalties included whipping, mutilation, and hanging.

The first British American colony to formalize religious liberty was Rhode Island, founded by Roger Williams in 1636. Williams had been banished from the Plymouth colony for denying the right of the state to control the consciences of individuals. In Rhode Island, he extended liberty to people of any religion and no religion at all.

By the time of the American Revolution, which ended with the Treaty of Paris in 1783, the two largest organized denominations in the former British colonies were the Anglican Church in the South and the Congregationalist churches in the North. Neither denomination was strong enough to be considered the established church across the colonies, and members of one did not want to see the other become the dominant church. In addition, Jews and members of smaller Christian churches also opposed the establishment of a single church in the United States. Many important founders of the new country, such as Thomas Jefferson, often emphasized the importance of religious freedom in their writings.

Meanwhile, other areas that would later become part of the United States came under the influence of French and Spanish Catholic missionaries. French Jesuit missionaries established religious communities in the Great Lakes region, the Mississippi River valley, and present-day Illinois, Louisiana, and beyond, while Spanish missions were established primarily in present-day Florida, New Mexico, Texas, Arizona, and California. Anti-Catholic sentiment in the United States was widespread among British Protestant settlers and remained prevalent into the twentieth century. Waves of immigration from predominantly Catholic countries in Southern Europe were resented by nativist Americans, many of whom felt that Catholics’ allegiance to the pope was a threat to democracy.

As the colonies unified into a singular nation, the protection of religious freedom was penned into its founding documents. Article VI of the US Constitution, adopted in 1789, forbade a religious test for any federal office or public trust. At that time, six states still had established churches, while Virginia had just passed a law establishing religious freedom. Many state leaders opposed federal interference in these matters. However, supporters of a strong central government recognized that a patchwork of religious laws at the state level could cause various problems for the country as a whole.

In 1791, the Bill of Rights was adopted. The First Amendment states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” While these words have been debated ever since, they have generally been understood to constitute a separation between church and state.

Thomas Jefferson’s 1802 reference to a “wall of separation between church and state” in his writings explaining the establishment and free exercise clauses have been especially influential on later interpretations. As such, the First Amendment has widely been accepted as establishing a pluralistic society by mandating that the government will neither interfere with the free exercise of religion nor establish a single, national religion. However, debate over the exact meaning of Jefferson’s explanation still emerged over the following decades. Secularists point to this statement as evidence that the United States was founded as a secular, rather than an exclusively Christian, nation. However, some critics maintain that the context does not support this meaning. They suggest that Jefferson was instead pointing out the separation between local church-state relations and the federal government.

In 1832 President James Madison wrote that it might be difficult to always maintain the “line of separation” between religious and civil authority. He added that he thought the best way to do so was to keep the government from interfering with religion in any way other than to “preserve public order” and protect the rights of each sect. Modern secularists point to this statement as further proof of the Founders’ intention to establish a secular state. Disestablishment within states occurred in the early nineteenth century, despite opposition from state governments and established churches. Massachusetts was the last state to do so, in 1833.

Despite formal precedent for secular government, Christianity often remained a significant influence in the public sector throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. However, in 1947, the Supreme Court handed down a decision in Everson v. Board of Education that included a significant interpretation of the establishment clause favoring strong separation between government and religion not only at the federal level but also for individual states. It marked the beginning of an era in which courts invalidated many government programs and practices that were found to have a religious purpose. As a result of these decisions, parochial schools could no longer be supported by public funds, and mandatory religious observance (such as teacher-led prayer) was banned from public schools.

While the Everson decision proved influential in promoting the principle of separation of church and state, it also galvanized considerable opposition. In particular, critics often took issue with the balance between the establishment clause and the free exercise clause, arguing that the latter implies a degree of protection for some aspects of religion in government practices. In this view, the federal government may be prohibited from establishing a religion at the national level and from interfering with the establishment of religion in the states but is not required to stamp out any hint of religious reference in governmental actions. Many supporters of this argument, which gained traction among conservatives through the late twentieth century and into the twenty-first, also hold that the United States is a Christian nation, founded on Judeo-Christian religious beliefs.

Secularists, on the other hand, argue that many, if not most, of the Founders were not even traditional Christians; instead, they were deists, who believe that God exists but is not actively involved in the day-to-day workings of the world and its people. A number of these Founders, such as Thomas Paine, even dismissed organized religion entirely. Secularists point to the fact that the word “God” does not appear in the Constitution as support for their argument that the United States was founded as a secular nation. They argue that strict separation of church and state, as interpreted in the establishment clause, is necessary to truly assure religious freedom for all as outlined by the free exercise clause.

Separation of Church and State Today

Debate over separation of church and state continued in the twenty-first century and even accelerated as a component of deepening partisan political division and the so-called culture wars. In the early 2000s, President George W. Bush’s establishment of faith-based initiatives and the creation of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives and Centers for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives stirred controversy over government promotion of religion. Conversely, some churches raised concerns in the late 2000s and early 2010s over perceived government interference in their affairs under the administration of President Barack Obama. In particular, provisions in the 2010 Affordable Care Act health care reform bill that required insurance coverage of contraceptives were met with fierce opposition from religious conservatives. The federal mandate included an exemption that applied to church organizations, but not to affiliated nonprofits like church-sponsored hospitals. In the 2014 case Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, however, the Supreme Court ruled that closely held private companies were also entitled to a religious or moral exemption.

The Burwell decision was one of several examples in which the Supreme Court, which was increasingly dominated by conservatives, relaxed its stance on separation of church and state. Other issues that generated significant controversy included the display of religious monuments on state or federal property and prayer by public officials. For example, courts approved displaying the Ten Commandments as part of a broader exhibit on legal traditions at a courthouse in Kentucky, and the Supreme Court decision in The American Legion v. American Humanist Association (2019) allowed a Latin cross (generally considered a Christian symbol) that was erected as a World War I memorial to remain on public property. The Supreme Court ruled in Town of Greece v. Galloway (2014) that prayers were allowed at government meetings, including prayers of specific sects, under the rationales that such prayers were for the benefit of the officials themselves and that requiring nonsectarian prayers would amount to religious censorship. Similarly, in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District (2022) the court ruled that a high school football coach who was fired for leading prayer on the field during and after games was within his First Amendment rights to do so, as his prayer constituted protected speech and only “coercive” conduct could be banned.

The Supreme Court also found religious institutions could receive funds from neutral state-run grant or scholarship programs in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002) and Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia Inc. v. Comer (2017). In Carson v. Makin (2022), it ruled that states subsidizing private school attendance must provide funds for private religious schools as part of those programs. Some state-level policies went a step further toward providing direct government funding to a religious institution, such as Oklahoma’s 2023 approval of the St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School as a public charter school, prompting much criticism. Subsequently, this policy also met legal challenges, and after the highest court in the state deemed the public funding of a religious public charter school unconstitutional in 2024, a 2025 tied Supreme Court ruling upheld this decision, blocking the school's establishment.

Further controversies have involved public education about religion; enforcement of the 1954 Johnson Amendment, which prevents tax-exempt nonprofits like houses of worship from directly endorsing and funding political candidates; restrictions on abortion and reproductive treatments; and so-called religious liberty laws that allow anti-LGBTQ discrimination on moral or religious grounds. Many of these issues gained heightened attention during the administration of President Donald Trump (2017–21), which was strongly influenced by fundamentalist Christian ideology. For example, Trump was widely criticized for banning visitors from a number of majority-Muslim countries and for using biblical scripture to justify migrant family separations at the US-Mexico border.

Many observers suggested that a surge in Christian nationalism and other conservative social influence contributed to backlash against the separation of church and state in the 2010s and early 2020s. According to 2021–22 research by the Pew Research Center, three in five Americans believed that the country was founded to be a Christian nation, and nearly half of respondents agreed it should be one now. About one in three said that being a Christian nation means being influenced, informed, or guided by Christian faith. Fewer than one in five held that the United States should impose Christian mores through its laws, however. More than three-quarters felt that Supreme Court decisions should not be swayed by justices’ faith and that houses of worship should not endorse candidates for office.

Separation of church and state in the context of public education was prominently tested once again due to a law passed in Louisiana in 2024 requiring all classrooms to display the Ten Commandments. Immediately challenged by concerned parents, a lower court ruled the law unconstitutional in 2024 before a federal appeals court also sided with the plaintiffs in 2025. Still, lawmakers advocating for educational inclusion of such religious documents as critical to the nation's history persisted, with Texas's governor signing a similar bill into law around that same time. Meanwhile, the concept of separation of church and state in general came increasingly to the fore after Trump took office for a second term as president in 2025, particularly following his signing of an executive order creating a federal religious liberty commission.

These essays and any opinions, information or representations contained therein are the creation of the particular author and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of EBSCO Information Services.

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