The cry, “That violates the separation of church and state!” has
been the centerpiece of the secularist drive to marginalize
Christianity in the public sphere since the 1940s. The real —
and often neglected — question is what precisely that separation
means and how it should be interpreted and applied. The
secularists’ interpretation of the establishment clause — the
line of the First Amendment that reads, “Congress shall make no
law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the
free exercise thereof” — ultimately rests upon anti-Christian
prejudice and involves cherry picking from certain founders’
writings. In recent years, we have seen groups such as the ACLU,
the Freedom from Religion Foundation, Americans United for the
Separation of Church and State; Web sites such as Infidels.org;
and leftist publications such as the Nation come out of the
woodwork with attempts to refute the notion that America was
ever a Christian nation. Instead, they recast the founders as
anti-clericalists in the mol