When a presidential commission recommends that the government formally reject "the separation of church and state" as a myth, what do the founding documents actually say — and what do religious traditions themselves say about a state that endorses one faith?
It is true that the words "separation of church and state" are not in the Constitution — but the principle is, written three times over: no religious test for office (Article VI), no establishment of religion (First Amendment), and application to the states (Fourteenth Amendment). The legitimate modern debate is about how much the government must accommodate religious expression, and reasonable people genuinely disagree there. But formally declaring that church and state are "not separate" is a different and larger step — one the founders, including the devoutly religious among them, deliberately foreclosed, and one that religious minorities and many believers themselves regard as a danger rather than a victory. A government empowered to endorse a faith is a government empowered to choose one.
Religious perspectives
The argument that church-state separation is a "lie" is usually made in the name of religion — so it matters that religious traditions themselves, especially those that have lived under an established faith, are among separation's most determined defenders.
Christianity: The faith that would be the presumptive beneficiary of any American religious establishment is also the faith with the longest record of being damaged by establishment. The Constantinian merger of church and Roman state, the Inquisition, the Wars of Religion, and the persecution of dissenters are part of why the Baptist minister Roger Williams — driven out of Puritan Massachusetts — argued that an established church produces a "garden" overrun by the "wilderness" of state power. Jesus refused political kingship (John 6:15) and told Pilate "my kingdom is not of this world" (John 18:36). A government hotline declaring official theological positions is exactly the fusion of Caesar's authority with God's that "render unto Caesar" (Matthew 22:21) was meant to keep apart.
Judaism, Islam, and minority faiths: Every tradition that is not the establishment candidate has a direct stake here. Two millennia of Jewish experience under Christian and Islamic states produced a hard-won conviction that any official religion, however benignly intended, eventually disadvantages those outside it. The same is true for Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and the growing share of Americans with no religious affiliation. A government that declares "there is no separation of church and state" is, unavoidably, a government preparing to decide which church.
The honest counterweight: Supporters of the commission's view are not asking for a theocracy, and it would be a caricature to say they are. Their real concerns — that secular government can become hostile to religious expression, that people of faith are sometimes pressured to check their convictions at the door of public life — are legitimate and shared by many believers. Free exercise of religion is a genuine constitutional value, and religious citizens have every right to bring their convictions into public debate. The disagreement is not about whether faith belongs in public life; it is about whether the government should put its thumb on the scale for a particular faith.
Constitutional & legal framework
The commission's strongest point is also its narrowest: the exact phrase "separation of church and state" does not appear in the Constitution. Everything else about the constitutional record cuts the other way.
The background: President Trump's Religious Liberty Commission, established by executive order in 2025 and chaired by Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, is preparing a final report due around July 4, 2026. Members have publicly urged the government to reject the principle of church-state separation — including a proposed federal hotline with a recording stating "there is no separation of church and state" — alongside recommendations to expand public funding for religious schools and broaden religious exemptions. The commission chair has called the separation principle a "lie."
What the text actually says: The phrase is a shorthand, but the principle is written into the document in three distinct places. Article VI, Clause 3: "No religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States" — the only mention of religion in the original Constitution, and it is a prohibition. The First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." The Fourteenth Amendment, through which the Supreme Court applied the Establishment Clause to the states (Everson v. Board of Education, 1947). The "wall of separation" metaphor comes from Thomas Jefferson's 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists, but the metaphor describes the clauses; it is not a substitute for them.
The founders' deliberate choices: James Madison's "Memorial and Remonstrance" (1785) argued — on theological grounds — that state-supported religion weakens faith by replacing conviction with conformity. The Senate-ratified Treaty of Tripoli (1797) stated that "the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion." These were not accidents; they were the considered work of a generation that had watched established churches at close range.
The genuine doctrinal shift: The commission is right that the law has moved. Recent decisions — Kennedy v. Bremerton (2022), Carson v. Makin (2022) — have narrowed Establishment Clause doctrine and required that religious institutions not be excluded from neutral public benefits. There is real, legitimate debate about accommodation: when does excluding religion become hostility to it? But "the Establishment Clause should be read narrowly" is a very different proposition from "the government should formally declare that church and state are not separate." The first is ordinary constitutional argument. The second asks the government to repudiate a structural commitment that no Supreme Court — including the current one — has come close to abandoning.
See: Article VI → | First Amendment → | Madison's Memorial and Remonstrance →
Sources cited:BibleConstitutionSupreme Court