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Entry: Hitchens' Hubris Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/hitchens_hubris#2710 Post contents: Further to the question of "separation of church and state," is should be pointed out that the phrase occurs nowhere in the Constitution. The First Amendment provides, as I noted in my previous post, that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, of prohibiting the free exercise thereof..." The words "separation of church and state" were taken from a letter by Thomas Jefferson to a Baptist congregation in Danbury, Connecticut. They have so often been mouthed by the secularist faction to imply that the Constitition mandates governmental adoption of atheism that it is informative to look at their original context. The Baptists wrote to Jefferson, who was popularly reputed to be an atheist and Jacobin, out of concern that he would use the power of his office to interfere with worship. He replied to them that a wall of separation existed between the church and the state to protect the state from harming the church. The First Amendment's original intent was to prevent the Federal government from interfering with the religious establishments of the several states. Massachusetts, for example, maintained an established church of Congregational polity until 1833; Connecticut, until 1818. The First Amendment was never held to interfere with the right of Massachusetts or Connecticut to have their own established churches. The legal ancestry of the First Amendment's free exercise clause goes back to Magna Charta, which contained a provision that made the church independent of secular government. This was inserted in reaction to the meddlings of Henry II. in the affairs of the church, as illustrated in the Constitutions of Clarendon which he forced the bishops to sign, and which culminated in the murder of the archbishop of Canterbury, St. Thomas à Becket. This was recent and much-resented history to the barons who forced King John to renounce such interference, as well as many other abusive exercises of royal prerogative, in 1215. Sent at: 2008 07 24