Separation of church and state
From RationalWiki
Separation of church and state is the political position that the civil government should not have any involvement in religious matters, and vice versa. While not a universal trait of all Westernized governments, such a position is enshrined in the constitutions of a number of countries, including the United States (through the United States Constitution's "no religious test" clause and First Amendment), Turkey, and France and exists de facto in some countries, particularly British Commonwealth states such as Australia and Canada that have a limited Anglican Church presence.
The concept of separation sprang from the ecclesiastical abuses of the Middle Ages, where European city-states were essentially vassals of an often-corrupt Roman Catholic theocracy. This arrangement carried over into the English colonies that later became the United States, where in most of the colonies the Church of England was the established church. Dissenting (non-CoE Protestants such as Presbyterians, Congregationalists, or Baptists) did live in the colonies but were subjected to varying degrees of toleration. During the American Revolution, many of these dissenter groups seized on the opportunity to seek disestablishment. Due to experiences with religious repression in both the Old World and the New World, many of the founders of the United States (along with many of their correspondents in the churches of the new country) felt that the best way to protect the country from the hegemony of any one religion was to word either the state or national constitutions to require the government show no favoritism towards any church, first with the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, then in the national constitution with a clause in Article VI forbidding the government from requiring any employee to belong to any specific faith (the so called test-oath clause), later forbidding any civil involvement with religion at all with the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights and affirming the whole enterprise by the Jefferson-era Treaty of Tripoli. Other governments, most notably that of revolutionary France, followed suit.
