My title might seem to you odd, and you wouldn't be wrong to think it odd.

After all, the question, can the separation of church and state be sustained, might seem to have been settled.

Within some corners of the United States, church and state have been separate now for almost a quarter of a millennium.

Within other quarters, they have been separate for nearly 200 years.

Moreover, the purpose for their separation has been fulfilled.

Catholics and Protestants are not murdering one another in the United States and really

never have engaged much in that kind of conduct. And within Western Christendon and even

to some degree beyond, our success in this country has inspired imitation. Even in, say,

England and Scotland, where tradition is honored and at least

nominally there's an established church. Throne and altar are no longer in any serious way entangled.

I spent a year or two terms at All Souls College, and in the middle of my time there,

a law was passed that you couldn't serve food and alcohol, no, food and have smoking in the same room.

And so, in consequence, the smoking room, where they served coffee after dinner and so forth

you couldn't smoke in but the college voted to keep calling it the smoking room very very

English and so there's an established church in name only. Within Western Christendom,

the decision to separate church and state was a response to a problem. Christianity

is first and foremost a religion of faith. As a consequence, doctrinal differences

have frequently given rise to schism and where church and state were closely connected,

schism gave rise to violence, domestic disorder, and even in the international sphere to war.

In antiquity, before the conversion of Constantine, religious disputes within Christianity were by and

large confined to the private sphere.

After Constantine's conversion, as is evidenced by the Council of Nicaea, which was aimed

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