Lord John Acton, the British historian best known for saying "power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely," more importantly said that "religion is the key of history." Certainly history shows that understanding any culture, including our own, requires a proper understanding of its religion.

The first words in the Constitution's First Amendment are, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Pretty straightforward – or would be had we not come to believe that it implies freedom from religion instead of freedom of religion.

Note that Jefferson's often misunderstood "wall of separation between church and state" is not mentioned in the Constitution. Indeed, that phrase is just a useful shorthand way of saying that we should not have an "established" church which, according to the Founders, meant only that we would not have an official state religion as the British do with Anglicanism. So we don't. The Supreme Court, however, in a series of "progressive" decisions going back to 1947, has clouded our formerly clear understanding of this. Activities like saying a prayer at the beginning of the public school day and posting the Ten Commandments in courthouses – once understood as acknowledgements of our religious roots - both have been declared to "establish" religion in the United States. Separation of church and state, alas, has come to mean separation of religion and society, an altogether different thing.

The Founders, of course, fully expected that religion and religious people would play an important role in civic affairs. Indeed, their idea of effective self-government depended on it. How strange then that a high school valedictorian may not thank God for, well, anything but the Department of Health and Human Services can force religious institutions to pay for abortions even though that violates their most sacred principles.

Of course, no right is absolute. Government long ago banned the Mormon practice of multiple marriage (though the same sex "marriage" debate necessarily opens up that question again). But legislating against extreme practices does not give government a blanket right to legislate on religion in any way it chooses. If church and state truly are separate, then the state may not wantonly interfere in the church's sphere of influence. And without a formally established national religion, the church cannot interfere in the state's sphere of influence, though religious people naturally will still maintain their participatory rights as citizens. An obligation to render unto Caesar does not negate the right to render unto God.

When the state presumes to regulate church affairs, it denies the existence of the very barrier it claims to support. That turns governmental neutrality toward specific religions into governmental hostility toward religion in general as illustrated by that viciously intrusive HHS mandate and the forced closing of religious-run adoption services when they refuse to place children with gay couples on the basis of their religious beliefs. That is not what the first amendment was intended to do.

Nowadays, we often hear public officials speak of "freedom of worship" rather than "freedom of religion" though the former is a much narrower concept that is not constitutionally warranted. Freedom of religion involves a great deal more than what people do in their church buildings on Sundays. "Freedom of worship" constricts and marginalizes real freedom of religion which, not surprisingly, is why "progressives" like it. Anything that weakens the influence of traditional religion in our civic affairs strengthens the state and increases peoples' dependence on it. That is the "progressive" tendency.

The First Amendment recognizes the Judeo-Christian moral foundation of American culture and limits the power of the state to control it. Acknowledging our religious background in public ways neither "establishes" religion nor violates the parallel principle of tolerance for other faiths. It does, however, sensibly recognize that "religion is the key of history."

Church and state should be separate. Religion and society should not.