Today, seventy percent of Americans assume that the "wall of separation between church and state" is an inviolable constitutional principle, the bedrock of the nation’s democratic pluralism. Jefferson intended, as did all the founders, to insulate religions of every type from interference by the government, and to keep government from anointing one form of religious observance over any other.
Critics of the concept of separation between church and state point out that the words do not appear in the Constitution, and should not be invoked to prevent the state from promoting the interests of religion so long as no particular religion is declared the nation’s official faith to which all must lend support or deference. Recently, the Texas Education Agency issued new guidelines for history texts that omit mention of Thomas Jefferson because he coined the term "separation of church and state." For the first time in many decades, the doctrine of "separation of church and state" has been turned nationally into politically contested territory, literalists from various American religious denominations on one side, and those (from both right and left) who hold to accepted constitutional readings of the appropriate relationship between religion and public life, as defined in Supreme Court decisions dating back to 1887, on the other.
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The George Washington Institute for Religious Freedom takes its cue from Washington himself, who wrote to a group of clergy who protested in 1789 against a lack of mention of Jesus Christ in the Constitution, "You will permit me to observe that the path of true piety is so plain as to require but little political direction." In that same year, he wrote to the Baptists of Virginia, a distinct religious minority in that state, "If I could conceive that the general (that is "national" or "federal") government might ever be so administered as to render the liberty of conscience insecure … no one would be more zealous than myself to establish effectual barriers against the horrors of spiritual tyranny, and every species of religious persecution."