Welcome to 3 and 3.

Three key facts in three minutes or less on the topics you care about most.

The Separation of Church and State.

Key fact number one.

The phrase separation of church and state appears nowhere in the Constitution.

The sentiment is often implied from the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, which states,

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

Contextually, this means the federal government was never meant to be in the church running business,

like the Church of England, the Church of Scotland, the Church of Iceland, or like 26 African-Arab and Asian countries, the official religion of Islam.

The Founding Fathers and their documents consistently reaffirmed the notion that there was no state church.

Thomas Jefferson confirmed freedom of worship in a letter to the Danbury Baptists, where he wrote,

Confining myself, therefore, to the duties of my station, which are merely temporal, be assured

that your religious rights shall never be infringed by any act of mine and that.

Key fact number three.

While there is, of course, no official state church,

America's founding principles are inescapably linked to and based on God.

The Declaration of Independence reads,

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,

that they are endowed

by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.

The key and very deliberate word used there, unalienable, means that these rights cannot

be taken away by man, nor granted by man, because these are birth rights bestowed upon all human beings not by man but by

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