I am now on my soap box. Please be patient.
Some people say that the Separation of Church and State exists tacitly in our Constitution. The fact is, it does not. Similar to these statements below, Thomas Jefferson used the term in a personal writing to a Baptist Minister in response to a question from the church. The detractors of today have taken it out of context for their personal agenda. The statements below reflect the deepest thoughts of our Founding Fathers. From these, you can see just how far we traveled from the Founders intent. It saddens me that our children will not see the America I grew up with. Patriotic, Compassionate, and Free. God bestowed us with a great nation and those who detest God are trying to bring it down. Unfortunately, their inroads are far too great today and we must, at some point begin to push back for the sake of our future generations. We are celebrating the Birth of Christ next week and had this miracle of miracles not happened we would not be as were are today, truly blessed. We have been given the blessings of God to make our world a better place. It is our mandate, and we should never let those who want to remove the word of God from our society succeed.
I am now off my soap box.
How do you argue with a person whose citations are variable to personal whim?
The government practice of separating church and state took hold in the nineteen hundreds, mostly in the latter half of the century. But this is not where the separation is rooted. The separation is rooted in the Reconstructionist Fourteenth Amendment, and I have no delusions it is a Republican amendment as the Republican Party controlled most state governments at the time and the federal government, all of which were necessary for ratification.
In 1925, the Republican controlled US Supreme Court, headed by Chief Justice Taft, the former President, used the Fourteenth Amendment to change the republican form of government the founders had given in the US Constitution. The court created the “Incorporation Doctrine”, and in so doing, extended the prohibitions placed upon the federal government to all states. Until this doctrine, and the application of the doctrine, states were free to apply religion to government institutions. Some states even had official state religions, primarily Southern states.
Gone with the “Incorporation Doctrine” were the many republics that formed our nation, replaced by one republic.
Too many conservatives today wish to conserve that which they were born into, which is a nation with the “Incorporation Doctrine”, and not the nation given by the Founders. What these conservatives conserve is a nation very different from what the Founders intended. The only way back is the repeal of the Fourteenth Amendment, which would make moot the "Incorporation Doctrine".