Al Mohler has an excellent post on his blog today succinctly tracing the fallacious path by which courts began building a "strict wall of separation" between church and state. Mohler says:

The First Amendment does not even mention the separation of church and state. Who came up with this? As most Americans know, it was Thomas Jefferson, who in a now-famous 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association of Connecticut stated, "I contemplate with sovereign reverence the act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church and state."

With one letter, Jefferson set the course for a reinterpretation of the First Amendment. His terminology of a wall of separation between church and state, once widely adopted, would become the catalyst for a legal and political revolution at the intersection of government and religion. Generations of judges came to understand their role to be the protectors of Jefferson's wall. The historical sequence that leads from Thomas Jefferson's letter to Judge Myron Thompson's order is clear and undeniable.

It's also interesting that Thomas Jefferson has become the Rosetta Stone by which judicial activists interpret the First Amendment of the Constitution. Do you know where Jefferson was during the framing and ratification of the Constitution? Thousands of miles away in Paris, where he was the U.S. ambassador to France. Thomas Jefferson did not write or ratify one word of the United States Constitution.