🇺🇸How does United States mark Religion and the state: how far apart a constitution puts them?

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The main body of the United States constitution says almost nothing about religion; the provision that matters is the first of the Bill of Rights. The First Amendment opens: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof — one sentence containing two clauses, later named the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause, and nearly every American constitutional argument about religion and government plays out in the tension between them. Three things are worth noticing. First, the subject of the sentence is Congress — not the government, not the state; what the text restrains is the legislature. Second, it shares a single sentence with speech, press, assembly and petition: religion is not an article of its own but the first item in a run of expressive freedoms. Third, the word "separation" does not appear; that phrasing comes from a later interpretive tradition, not from the text. Compared with the itemised prohibitions of Japan's Article 20, the American version is shorter and more abstract — and therefore leaves the drawing of the line to the courts.