First Amendment ~ Lesson 1 ~ Religion

Amendment I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

It's amazing how many interpretations you'll find for this single compound sentence, and how many people don't realize this is where the concept of "separation between church and state" comes from. It's all right there in the first portion of the sentence, and to anybody that remembers sentence structure from grade school, it's clear.

I realize that last statement sounds condescending but it isn't meant to, very few people actually remember dissecting sentences in grade school. But being a word jockey, I tend to be obsessive with the written word. Writers and teachers will be the few that remember how to break down sentences.




Here are a few definitions that will help us get started:

Simple sentence: A sentence with just a noun, a verb, and the particles that hold it together. e.g. "Congress shall make."

Complete sentence, Plain sentence, full sentence, sentence: Just what it says, a sentence that has minimal punctuation holding it together.

Compound sentence: This is where two complete sentences are pulled together by a conjunction or semicolon.

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

This is the section we need to look at, the section that is often misunderstood. So let's classify the main words in this sentence.

Nouns: Congress, law, establishment

Verbs: shall, make, respecting, prohibiting, exercise

That's right, "establishment" is a noun. Had it been meant as a verb it would have read "Congress shall make no law establishing a religion." "Of religion" is a preposition describing what kind of establishment they were referring to.

So when "Congress shall make now law respecting" the word respecting means honoring, or based on. Therefore, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" means that Congress won't make any laws that are based solely on any religious belief. That is the portion that says keep religion out of government.

The portion that everyone seems to get right is the latter part of the compound sentence, "or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;" This is the portion that says keep government out of religion.

So when somebody says that the separation between church and state is guaranteed in the First Amendment, don't look at them lost and confused and say, "Really, in the First Amendment?" Although it isn't said that concisely, that is what is there.