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Argumentative Essay: America's Right To Religious Freedom

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America’s right to religious freedom is under threat, and has been for a long time. It was written down in congressional records that the founders declared, “We don’t want what we had in Great Britain: we don’t want one denomination running the nation. We do want God’s principles, but we don’t want one denomination running the nation”. There has been a struggle for all of recorded history on one particular question, what is the correct association between church and state?
We see this debate recorded all the way back to the Epic of Gilgamesh and plenty of other Greek mythologies. In most of Europe, the local religions create a relatively successful monopoly on the faith and loyalty of the locals. However, the US constitution, heavily saturated with classic liberalism, attempted a unique idea. The writers of the constitution intended to combine an absence of an established state religion and the citizens right …show more content…

The founders of the constitution cared quite a bit about religion, and they were adamant about creating a separation between the government and the people’s ability to practice religion. The first amendment does not exclusively protect the freedom to worship, but the right to free exercise. This includes the right to have a different religion and to make choices based on the values of that religious doctrine. This is much broader than the right to worship because it does not exclusively protect the right to pray in whatever way one chooses to pray, but it protects the right to make decisions based off of one’s religion. However, now there is a need to define exactly how far these religious practices can go before the state has to step in on religious practices that conflict with state laws that are now allowed to set the moral code for the state and the

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