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There is a big difference between Christmas choral shows and requiring all students to profess a certain belief as stated by a certain denomination. That would go against the First Amendment without a doubt - "Madison then spoke, and said that "he apprehended the meaning of the words to be, that Congress should not establish a religion, and enforce the legal observation of it by law, nor compel men to worship God in any manner contrary to their conscience." " and Thomas Cooley " Undoubtedly the spirit of the Constitution will require, in all these cases, that care be taken to avoid discrimination [472 U.S. 38, 106] in favor of or against any one religious denomination or sect;"

If your school required all students to attend services and in opening prayers, Christmas services, etc. promoted one sect, then it violated the Constitution and that practice was no doubt, stopped.

Ophiucus, read what you wrote! You wrote the meaning of the Constitution (mostly) correctly, but you totally misunderstood what you wrote. To my knowledge at no time in history has the congress passed a law "respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof". It has not happened. Therefore, the 1st Amendment protection of religion, intended to protect the states and the people from the federal government, has never been usurped by federal lawmakers. It has been usurped, many times, by unelected federal judges who have imposed their wills and ideologies on the states and the people.

... the US attempted to establish a secular government with a nonsecular people.

I'm not so sure about that, Ophiucus. One of the first things the first congress did was to establish a daily, Christian prayer. Certainly the first congress would been in a better position to know the intent of the constitution than you or I. Justice Story, in his Commentaries, disputes the notion that the original intent was to create a secular nation. The notion that this is a secular nation is new-fangled, worming its way into our "laws" via judiciary usurpation within the last 40 or 50 years.