…Whether this relationship drifts towards a domestication o the Church or a churchifying of the State does not only depend on the arrangement itself–state church, concordat, or separationist-but is influenced by the development of the society too. As for the ’separationist model of the United States, what the Founding Fathers originally had in mind was freedom of belief in an ecumenical sense–as the peaceful coexistence of different Christian churches, whose respective influences on public life were possible and desired in the framework of the constitutionally prescribed non-preferential treatment of any one of them. After all, the Fathers of that constitution were for the most part Christians of the kind who wished to fulfill their call to contribute to the welfare of society. What was admittedly in tension in the thinking of the Founding Fathers–that is, genuinely liberal and specifically biblical elements–is countered by a one-sided solution brought about by the post-Christian liberal trend of American society, a solution which at the same time promotes the dissolution of the fruitful tension between state and churches. The view of the ‘cult’ as the reserve for ‘the practice of religion’ corresponds to the liberal notion of ‘mere belief’. So what was once thought of as a limitation of the state, whose neutrality forbids the preferential treatment of any particular denomination, is remoulded into the limitation of the exercise of religion. One might almost say that the social dissolution of the tension between state and churches or religions is pursued as the dissolution of political worship.

Bernd Wannenwetsch, Political Worship, 239