When the American founding fathers set up a system in which church
and state were kept separate, they had no intention of separating the
state from religion. What was at stake at America’s founding was the
question of sphere sovereignty. The Constitution separates the
mechanisms of the institutional church from the mechanisms of the
federal government, allowing both spheres to flourish without
interference from the other.
This meant that church ministers didn’t have any authority over
statesmen in the federal government, but it also meant that congress
couldn’t interfere with the freedoms of the church.
Even this sphere
sovereignty originally only applied at the level of federal government
and not state government, as Daniel Dreisbach has shown in his book Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation Between Church and State and as I have shown in the following articles: ‘Bill of Rights‘ and ‘Free Speech and Animal Cruelty‘ and ‘The Constitution and States Rights‘ and ‘The Constitutional Convention and States Rights‘.)
These distinctions are often confused.
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