The First Amendment of the Constitution self-conscientiously made the “freedom of religion” a founding principle of our American democracy. As discussed in the Aug, 1 issue of “The Scranton Post,” the First Amendment actually prohibits the making of any law concerning the establishment of religion, and thus it is often referred to as the “Non-Establishment Clause” of the First Amendment.
Thomas Jefferson is widely acknowledged to be the primary author of the Declaration of Independence, although he played no direct role in the writing of the Constitution of the United States or its First Amendment.
He was nevertheless one of the most influential of the founding fathers, and the third president of the United States. He held that office in the year 1802, when he addressed the following words to the Danbury Baptist Association, a religious minority in the state of Connecticut that had written to Jefferson because of their concern that their religious liberties were not firmly grounded in that state.
“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his god, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, 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 full exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state.” (The full text of this brief letter can be found at http://www.usconstitution.net/jeffwall.html .)
From that time on, it became common to speak of our Constitutional freedom of religion as “the wall of separation of Church and State.” Although the Constitution itself never uses these words, Jefferson’s metaphor of the wall of separation quickly became a shorthand slogan to refer to the non-establishment clause of the First Amendment.
The Supreme Court of the United States has had occasion to rule on religious liberty issues in a wide variety of cases over the full breadth of its existence.
One very useful clarification resulted from the 1940 case of Cantwell versus Connecticut. The Court explained that the First Amendment resulted in two constitutional freedoms: the freedom of conscience to believe and worship as one chooses is absolute - the state cannot make any law regulating what individuals should believe. The First Amendment also results in a freedom to act on our personal beliefs.  This freedom to act may be restricted by the state in certain circumstances.
As American society has become ever more secular or non-religious, a range of questions that would never have troubled our founding fathers has come to be discussed in the framework of the separation of church and state. None has provoked more controversy than the issue of prayer in public schools in classes or at school-sponsored activities.
Prayer in public schools was taken for granted for most of our nation’s history, and indeed, to this day each session of Congress is publicly opened with prayer.
Yet in a series of recent rulings, the Supreme Court has held that, “What to most believers may seem nothing more than a reasonable request that the non-believer respect their religious practices, in a school context may appear to the non-believer or dissenter to be an attempt to employ the machinery of the state to enforce a religious orthodoxy.” (Lee v. Weismann, 1992)
The practical result of these rulings has been a widespread change in American popular culture, in which religious actions that were previously taken for granted as being part of our American heritage are now forbidden on the basis of the separation of church and state.
In recent years, some groups have begun lobbying for the re-establishment of “the religious foundations of our nation,” even as the percentage of Americans actively participating in religious services continues to decline, and the religious diversity of our country expands to a wider range of beliefs and practices than ever before.
It would be presumptuous to predict what the future of these issues will look like, but I for one find solace in the knowledge that the defense of these freedoms has always involved at least a tension and often explicit conflict between intelligent people of good will.
The fact that we have overcome those conflicts in the past gives me hope we will successfully do so in the future.
An interesting collection of information about “The Constitution and Religion” can be accessed at:  http://www.usconstitution.net/consttop_reli.html
For an example of how deeply Christian Protestant values were integrated into everyday American culture, see the 19th Century “McGuffy Reader” at: http://tinyurl.com/McGruffy.