In recent years, more and more often political issues have been touching on areas that concern the moral standing of Americans. Current issues such as cloning, abortion, and stem cell research are just three issues of many that the opinions that Americans form are swayed by their religious beliefs. Approximately ninety percent of all American citizens practice some sort of religion. These facts alone are enough to demonstrate the need for Congress to recognize that they could be representing the nation’s voting population more effectively. Ignoring such facts would be doing the American people a disservice by incorrectly representing their true feelings.

At its core, this topic addresses a long-standing Constitutional debate. From the early years of the Constitution, Americans have debated the separation of church and state. This topic, which is not clearly defined in the Constitution, is one that I wish to shed a light on how we have reached our current national standing on the relationship between the government and religion. In today’s American society, church and state have become more strictly separated than what was intended by the drafter of the Constitution.

To fully understand the intentions of the language of the Constitution one must first recognize that this document was drafted nearly two hundred and thirty years ago. At the dawn of this nation, when the Constitution was drafted, it was uncertain how the country would take shape. The Constitution itself is composed of a loose language so that it would be able to serve as a lasting document to govern the country. The section of the first amendment that pertains to the relationship between church and state contains some ambiguity. While the intentions of Thomas Jefferson and our founding fathers will never be uncovered in their true state, we can look at the factors that shaped their words.

The line of the Constitution in question reads that the government should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” This line serves two main purposes. The first function of this line is to ensure that there would never be a single religion that was financially backed by the government. Great Britain, the country that we broke away from, had a national religion that quickly imposed on the personal religions of its people, even going as far as to forbid other forms of worship in private homes. Americans in their new country did not want this type of control to ever exist over them. Thomas Jefferson understood this fact therefore when the line was written it ensured that a situation would never exist like the one in Great Britain. The second function of this line is to allow for free worship in the United States.

The notion of the strict separation of church and state does not stem from the constitution, but from a letter written by Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist Association of Connecticut. In the early 1800’s there was rumor that the Congressionalist religion would be made the religion of the United States. To protect against a situation being created like that in England Thomas Jefferson cited the line in the Constitution, as meaning there should be strict separation between church and state. Therefore, this proves that the idea of strict separation of church and state was created by a source outside of the Constitution itself