Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Liberals interpret to mean: There shall be a wall of separation between Church and State.
Let's disect this: The words - There, be, wall, separation, between, Church, State, are NOT found in the 1st Amendment. So if we scratched those words from the Liberal Interpretation, they would be left with: a, shall, and that conforms with the ACTUAL 1st Amendment. There's not much to stand on is there.
An “establishment of religion” clearly means an official state church. Anybody with any knowledge of history, or the ability to actually pick up a book and read it, knows that the Founding Generation fought Great Britain, which had an official state church (called, surprisingly enough, the “Church of England”). Since the Founders wished to do things differently than the English, especially those things used by the tyrannical English government to oppress people, not having a state-sanctioned church is the only logical meaning of that phrase.
Hooey.
Up till well after the civil war, the basic political struggle in America was between those who wanted to expand those who had full civil rights, and those who resisted expansion. Both sides fully supported the constitution, they just had different ideas about who it applied to.
It wasn't till the Progressives came along in the later 19th century that we had a significant group that wanted to dump those boring old rights because they inhibited their gleeful use of government power to "solve problems."
The battle the author mentions is therefore not much over 100 years old, not "all of our nations' history."