The director of the Lifelong Learning department at our local university pulled me aside. A student had told her that the first session of my course — titled “Contested History: The Story of Church-State Separation” — was “mind-blowing.” I had not expected that.
As a historian, for years I have taught lifelong learning courses. Increasingly popular, the short-term classes are filled with people from all walks of life who share one commonality: a thirst for understanding. Deeply curious, lifelong learners seek to better contextualize the world in which we live, connect dots between the past and present, enhance their own knowledge, and hone their worldview. But how many people really want to understand the historical journey of church-state separation?
To my surprise, 82 people took the four-week course. Liberal, progressive, moderate, conservative, libertarian — they came week after week.
Because I teach conversationally, we had meaningful dialogue. We learned from one another. We sharpened one another. Still, for many Americans, church-state separation is misunderstood. Or entirely unknown.
In 2018, the American Council for Trustees and Alumni warned of “the danger ignorance of history poses to the future of a free society.” They cited a survey gauging “knowledge of U.S. history” that had “produced some discouraging results. More Americans could identify Michael Jackson as the composer of ‘Beat It’ and ‘Billie Jean’ than could identify the Bill of Rights as a body of amendments to the U.S. Constitution.”
First Amendment surveys conducted by the Freedom Forum between the years 1997 and 2019, consisting of identical questions over that time, offer additional insight. Consistently, a third of Americans could not name a single First Amendment right. For those who could name only one, freedom of speech stood far above the rest. Only about a third identified freedom of religion. In Freedom Forum’s 2024 survey, the numbers improved only slightly.
Confusingly, many who are aware of constitutional religious freedom falsely believe the First Amendment allows for the joining of church and state, an inhibitor of freedom of religion. Such historical ignorance is dangerous — and further magnified by one particular demographic: white Christian Nationalists.
A 2022 poll by the University of Maryland found “that white grievance is highly correlated with support for a Christian nation. White respondents who say that members of their race have faced more discrimination than others are most likely to embrace a Christian America. Roughly 59 percent of all Americans who say white people have been discriminated against a lot more in the past five years favor declaring the U.S. a Christian nation, compared to 38 percent of all Americans.”
Such blatantly false claims of discrimination echo those voiced 250 years ago (and earlier) by clergy, legislators, and law officers of colonial “Establishment” [state] churches. Defending taxpayer-funded clergy salaries and their legal right to persecute those refusing to obey government religious mandates, members of state churches falsely insisted that a repeal of their state-protected religious privileges would itself be persecution.
Such nonsense failed to persuade America’s founding fathers. Rejecting the state Establishment Church model, they instead grounded the United States upon the separation of church and state, thereby protecting religious freedom equally for all.
But, Christian Nationalists of our present day claim that the phrase “separation of church and state” is not in the Constitution, and therefore does not exist. That’s also nonsense: By that false logic, Christian Nationalists [and all Americans] have no right to “privacy” — the word being absent the Constitution, but implied at numerous points.
In reality, the constitutional wording that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” means that government cannot align itself with any religion — as early American evangelical forebears of today’s white Christian Nationalists clearly understood.
In reality, actual religious freedom — possible only because of church-state separation — protects equally the rights of the devout, the atheist, and all others. Lifts up the kaleidoscope that is America. Checks the harming of one another in the name of religion, because using government to force a certain belief or lifestyle on others is a form of oppression — a denial of the humanity of our family members, our neighbors, and others within our communities.
That is the lived freedom reality of church-state separation to which Americans United is solely devoted.
From our nation’s founding to our lived experiences today, there is nothing more revolutionary than church-state separation, the guardian of our most cherished freedoms and a class unto itself. Now that’s mind-blowing.
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Church & State Editor Bruce Gourley is filling in while Americans United President and CEO Rachel Laser is on a temporary hiatus from writing the “Perspective” column.