“The real object of the Amendment was, not to countenance, much less advance Mahommedianism, or Judaism, or infidelity, by prostrating Christianity; but to exclude all rivalry among Christian sects, and to prevent any national ecclesiastical establishment, which should give to an hierarchy the exclusive patronage of the national government.”   – Joseph Story, Supreme Court Justice from 1811-1845, in Commentaries On the Constitution of the United States

The purpose here is to maintain a neutral stance with respect to all the various Christian denominations that dominated the country at the time of the founding fathers and still marginally do today.  The only intended wall of separation was to prevent one or another of the churches to become established as the national church and to prevent government interference in the areas of worship.  How strange it is that by the wrongful interpretation of a phrase in a letter by Jefferson assuring the Danbury Convention of Baptists of just that, we now have erected a wall that secularists and others attempt to use to keep Christianity out of the public square altogether.

An insertion of a footnote to a USSC decision has altered the traditions and beliefs of our founding fathers.  In so doing, government has intruded where it does not belong.  The various ways of seeing our founders and their fellow citizens believes were intended to freely compete in a market place of ideas and beliefs.  In doing that, it the establishment clause avoided “the twin evils of both politicized religion and divinized politics”. (See, The Libertarian Theology of Freedom, by Reverend Edmund A. Opitz, page 60.)