Why Americans won’t stop debating the separation of church and state
Story by Kelsey Dallas, Deseret News, 5/4/25
President Donald Trump launched a new commission on religious liberty on Thursday with some polarizing comments about church-state separation.
Speaking at a Rose Garden ceremony, the president questioned whether a gap between the government and religious organizations is a good thing and praised the people of faith working with his administration.
“They say separation between church and state. … I said, ‘All right, let’s forget about that for one time,’” he said near the beginning of his remarks.
He later added, “Whether there’s separation or not, you guys are in the White House where you should be, and you’re representing our country, and we’re bringing religion back to our country, and it‘s a big deal.”
Trump’s remarks were celebrated by many more conservative religious leaders, who thanked the president for making more room for religion in the public square.
But more liberal people of faith criticized Trump’s comments and the new commission, arguing that the president’s skepticism about the separation of church and state will hurt religion in the long term.
“Make no mistake, this new commission will do more to increase bullying in schools, workplace conflict, and religious discrimination than it will protect our constitutional rights or our churches,” said the Rev. Shannon Fleck, executive director of Faithful America, in a statement.
Separation of church and state and the Constitution
The reactions to Trump’s remarks should sound familiar if you follow faith-related legal debates.
Multiple times in recent years — and multiple times this week — religious freedom advocates in the United States have clashed over what the Constitution says about separating church and state and what role the concept should play in policy debates.
So what does the Constitution actually say?
It doesn’t include the phrase “separation of church and state,” according to the Freedom Forum.
The First Amendment does include the line “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,” which bars the government from naming an official religion or otherwise privileging one faith group over another.
The First Amendment also protects people of faith with its free exercise clause, which prevents Congress from passing laws that interfere with religious expression.
Religious freedom experts generally agree the First Amendment’s free exercise and establishment clauses work together to keep the government from disrupting religious people and organizations.
Thomas Jefferson said as much in a famous letter to a religious minority group in 1802.
“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church and State,” Jefferson wrote.
But religion experts don’t agree if the government is supposed to steer clear of religion altogether — or if church-state separation is good for people of faith.
That disagreement fuels ongoing conflict over issues like Ten Commandments displays on government property, school vouchers and prayers during government meetings.
“This whole area of law is really a mess,” said an attorney to the Deseret News in 2019 before the Supreme Court heard an establishment clause case.
Meaning of the establishment clause
More conservative legal scholars and religious leaders say the establishment clause — and the phrase “separation of church and state” by extension — only applies to a limited range of issues.
They believe government officials can’t name a state religion and also can’t mandate religious participation, by, for example, forcing Americans to send part of their paychecks to a church.
But these more conservative thinkers do not believe the establishment clause justifies other types of limits on church-state relationships, which is why they’re typically more supportive than their more liberal colleagues of, among other things, church-state funding partnerships, Christmas displays at statehouses and Trump’s approach to religious freedom.
More liberal legal scholars and religious leaders, on the other hand, apply the establishment clause more broadly. They typically believe government agencies and officials must avoid even passive endorsement of religious messages, whether it comes in the form of Ten Commandments posters or a state-funded scholarship used at a religious school.
The Supreme Court hasn’t done much to resolve the tension between those two viewpoints over the years.
In the 1970s and 1980s, some justices raised concerns about excessive entanglement between church and state and about government endorsement of religion, lending support to a broader interpretation of the establishment clause. But the related rulings created new issues, since judges across the country disagreed on how to decide if a faith-related display or public prayer had a secular purpose and what a neutral observer would say.
More recently, the Supreme Court has embraced a more conservative interpretation of the establishment clause, although they’ve done so by putting a focus on the free exercise of religion.
In three cases in the past eight years, the court has cleared the way for more public money to go to religious schools, with rulings that described policies based on the establishment clause as violations of the free exercise clause, as the Deseret News recently reported.
Church-state separation moving forward
This spring, the Supreme Court has another opportunity to clarify the relationship between church and state in a case focused on the nation’s first religious charter school.
Oklahoma’s Republican attorney general filed the lawsuit to stop the school, which is called St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, from participating in his state’s charter school program. He says such a partnership would violate Oklahoma law and the establishment clause.
St. Isidore is defending itself with the free exercise clause and the three recent funding rulings. It says Oklahoma’s effort to block the formation of religious charter schools amounts to religious discrimination.
Religious groups have reacted to the case in much the same way they reacted to Trump’s comments on Thursday. Some believe the school clearly violates the principle of church-state separation, while others say Oklahoma has erected a wall that doesn’t need to exist.
The Trump administration intervened in the case to offer support to the religious charter school.
During oral arguments on Wednesday, the justices, for the most part, seemed to sort themselves along the familiar conservative-liberal divide. More liberal justices emphasized potential establishment clause problems, while more conservative justices raised free exercise concerns.
Chief Justice John Roberts appeared to be the closest to the middle among the eight justices who took part in the arguments. His decision in the case may ultimately determine where the debate over the separation of church and state goes from here.