The Separation Of Church And State In The European Union

11 Pages 2742 Words

religion. Since this Amendment only refers to Congress, and not the states, the Fourteenth Amendment was added, in order to prohibit individual states from establishing a religion. “It all seems very clear at first glance, but as times change and people change there have been many questions about what the Constitution means about religion”(Kleeberg 2).
Since the First Amendment does not mention “separation of church and state” exclusively, there have been attempts to interpret this differently. The power to interpret the Constitution lies in the Supreme Court, and it has had several occasions when it was forced to do so. Such examples are the 1947 Everson v. Board of Education case, in which the Supreme Court allowed New Jersey to provide bus transportation for students of parochial schools, 1971 Lemon v. Kurtzman, in which the Supreme Court decided that state aid to parochial schools should have only secular purpose, must neither advance nor inhibit religion, and must not present excessive government entanglement with religion...