Skip to content

Monday, Sep. 28, 2020

Does the First Amendment explicitly call for the separation of church and state?

Christopher Hutton, Gigafact Foundry
no

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution says only that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…" In 1802, Thomas Jefferson wrote that its declaration, known as the "Establishment Clause," has built "a wall of separation between Church & State."

In 1947, Jefferson's interpretation was cited in a Supreme Court decision allowing public funds to pay for buses taking children to Catholic schools. Justice Hugo Black added that the “wall must remain high and impregnable.” "This discussion had a decidedly separationist tone and has been cited by liberals as authoritative ever since," observes Artemus Ward, a Northern Illinois University professor.

This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.

Sources

About fact briefs

Fact briefs are bite-sized, well-sourced explanations that offer clear "yes" or "no" answers to questions, confusions, and unsupported claims circulating online. They rely on publicly available data and documents, often from the original source. Fact briefs are written and published by newsrooms in the Gigafact network.

See all fact briefs

Between 2020 and 2022, under close editorial supervision, Gigafact contracted a group of freelance writers and editors to test the concepts for fact briefs and provide inputs to our software development process. We call this effort Gigafact Foundry. Over the course of these two years, Gigafact Foundry writers published over 1500 fact briefs in response to claims they found online. Their important work forms the basis of Gigafact formats and editorial guidelines, and is available to the public on Gigafact.org. Readers should be aware that while there is still a lot of relevant information to be found, not all fact briefs produced by Gigafact Foundry reflect Gigafact's current methods and standards for fact briefs. If you come across any that you feel are out of date and need to be looked at with fresh eyes, don't hesitate to contact us at support@gigafact.org.

Learn More

Latest Fact Briefs

Be a Friend of facts

Help us fund more great fact briefs like this one.