[Tilted]

Originally Posted by This_person

This is as applicable as asking "if dogs had wings, how fast could they fly?"

There's no legal separation of church and state - that was a line in a letter, not a legal status of anything. There's a prohibition against the government establishing a religion, and against the government from denying you the right to practice whatever religion you choose.

I have to disagree with you here. Although there is a widely held belief that there is no legal separation of Church and State, that belief is erroneous. The phrase was indeed given birth as a line in a letter by Thomas Jefferson, then the President of the United States. On January 1, 1802, in a letter to members of the Danbury Baptist Association, he 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 and State.

Admittedly, that statement, in and of itself, has no legal authority. However, the phrase was later given legal significance by the Supreme Court of the United States.

In Everson v. Board of Education (1947), the majority opinion included this passage:

Neither a state nor the Federal Government can, openly or secretly, participate in the affairs of any religious organizations or groups and vice versa. In the words of Jefferson, the clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect 'a wall of separation between Church and State.'

That ruling interpreted the establishment clause of the First Amendment as creating a wall of separation between Church and State, and in so doing it defined the meaning of the First Amendment as such. Many people have vehemently argued that the ruling was in error, basically that the Supreme Court got it wrong; however, it is what they held and that makes it the law of the land. (It was a 5-4 decision by the way, but 5-4 decisions carry the same legal effect as 9-0 decisions)

Furthermore, in Wallace v. Jaffree (1985), a case in which the Supreme Court struck down an Alabama Statute as unconstitutional, the 6-3 decision held, among other things, that:

The State's endorsement, by enactment of 16-1-20.1, of prayer activities at the beginning of each schoolday is not consistent with the established principle that the government must pursue a course of complete neutrality toward religion.

Justice Rehnquist wrote a very comprehensive dissent to the majority opinion in which he argued that the decision, as well as the decision in Everson v. Board of Education, was in conflict with the original intent of the First Amendment. Many people have argued that he was correct, but his dissent was just that, a dissent, and as such it holds no legal authority, except to the extent that someone refers to his arguments when making their own.

The notion of 'separation of Church and State' may have begun as a simple phrase in a letter, but it was given power, and indeed legal authority, by the Supreme Court of the United States. There are plenty of great legal minds who will tell you without reservation that they got it wrong; nonetheless, for legal purposes the validity of their interpretation is inherent.

In other words, although many people think it should be otherwise, in the United States there is a legal wall of separation between Church and State.