The Separation of Church and State: A Debate

Despite witnesses swearing on Bibles, spending millions of dollars each year on a military chaplain corps, the phrase "In God We Trust" appearing on our currency, and the United States Supreme Court opening its public sessions with the proclamation "God Save the United States and this Honorable Court," that same Court for forty years has-for the most part-successfully preserved the fiction that the Constitution requires an absolute separation between church and state. Our Constitution does mandate church-state separation with that famous first amendment injunction, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion . .. ."'