Most of the founding fathers, sympathetic with and influenced by the European Enlightenment, saw religion - natural religion, that is - as a potential good, but with equal clarity they saw the religions of existing institutions and religions based on a fixed scriptural revelation as meddlesome, wrong-headed and hopelessly obsolete.

In America, religious dissent is as vital as it is elusive. Like the secretions of the pituitary, the juices of dissent are essential to ongoing life even if we do not always know precisely how, when or where they perform their tasks, and the not knowing - the flimsy, filmy elusiveness - is supremely characteristic of America's expressions of religious dissent. For in the United States no stalwart orthodoxy stands ever ready to parry the sharp thrust or clever feints of dissent.

The first phrase of the First Amendment spoke to the freedom uppermost in Jefferson's mind when it provided that, 'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.' Here a double guarantee could be found: first, that government would do nothing to give official endorsement to a religion or to set one faith above another; second, that government would do nothing to inhibit the freedom of religion.

What good deed can government do for religion? The best deed of all: leave it free and unencumbered, burdened by neither enmity nor amity.

Most of the founding fathers, sympathetic with and influenced by the European Enlightenment, saw religion - natural religion, that is - as a potential good, but with equal clarity they saw the religions of existing institutions and religions based on a fixed scriptural revelation as meddlesome, wrong-headed and hopelessly obsolete.

One seeks to know the self better in order to know God better.

Jefferson found in the religion phrases of the First Amendment no vague or fuzzy language to be bent or shaped or twisted as suited any Supreme Court Justice or White House incumbent. That amendment had built a wall, with the ecclesiastical estate on one side and the civil estate on the other.