Just a quick note: This story of yours sounds incredible. I'd if you're writing something set in this world, I'd love to read it when it's done!

I'm story boarding and writing up a vague outline/synopsis right now actually.

So the US Army Chaplain Corps is also violation of the separation of church and state?

The US Army Chaplain Corps aren't detaining people and enforcing laws. They are also strictly regulated as noncombatant personnel. Everybody hated bringing a chaplain along on missions in Afghanistan because it made the locals go berserk and meant we had to divert a lot of manpower towards protecting him. They're commissioned officers, sometimes of high rank, and they would sometimes invite themselves on a mission. Was a huge pain in the ass.

@pojo-guy The First Amendment was meant to keep the Federal government out of state affairs; individual states were allowed to make whatever laws regarding religion they wanted. It just happened that the sates needed immigrants to boost their economies, and freedom of religion was attractive to immigrants, so the states either relaxed their religious laws or adopted permissive laws. While Jefferson used the phrase, the letter in which it appears is not a legal document, and the concept did not begin to be considered legally until the late 1800's.

@jaycie Beveri yup. I thought that was probably more information than I wanted to put in a comment, especially typing on a cell phone. It only became a legal precedent for promoting atheism in the mid 1960's

The principles behind the separation of church and state are to keep the government out of matters of faith. It's not really an issue of faith when you have people with actual infernal super powers and people are actually being possessed. You don't need faith when the demons are real.

@TCAT117 - when I was in the Navy back in the early 80's we had a full commander chaplain on our ship, which was (at most) a lieutenant's billet. Everyone in the wardroom wondered who he'd managed to piss off badly enough to to be sent out on sea duty... :-)

Ours kept inviting himself on missions in afghan. Pissed everyone off because then we had to organize a mounted satellite patrol, locals would go berzerk whenever he got out of the truck so we had to dedicate a PSD team to keep him from getting murdered from some pashto tribal who thought he was trying to cast a spell to taint the harvest or some other such superstitious crap.

Useless comment, but I just want to say I'd buy the hell out of this book, the idea is really original and interesting, wish you the best with it!

Note that A coalition of demon and infernal entity civil rights advocates is possibly already a mix of church and state (this is the same principle as "civil rights only for christians"), well before the actual church itself gets involved. If the demon and infernal entities are not particularly bound to religion, then you'd expect that non-religious people can deal with them too. If only the religious are "pure" enough to deal with them, then the demons an infernal entities are religious in nature and no laws should be made to their exclusive benefit.

@SethR: Faith can still factor into it. E.g. suppose a devout character who prays daily cannot be possessed. Then faith does factor into the situation with the (real) demons. This can lead to e.g. health insurers (who need to cover possesion related injuries) to force people to pray every day (similar to how car theft policies force you to lock your car doors - to keep claims to a reasonable minimum), which turns it into enforced faith, which violates the separation of church and state. If the religious are in any way more safe from the demons; this can lead to society enforcing faith.

Check out John Ringo's "Special Circumstances" for his take.

@Flater, faith is the belief in something that can't be seen and can't be proven. The reason we keep government out of faith is because there is no reason to believe anyone in the government should know better than anyone else in those matters. If we can demonstrate that praying will keep you from being possessed by demons, it's not faith, it's verifiable. The reasons for keeping church and state separate go out the window.

Voting to Reopen. POB means the Q has insufficient guidance, restrictions, or limitaitons to permit the OP to evaluate one answer as better than other beyond popularity. I'm VERY hard pressed to believe that is the case here. Remember, this is a creative site. Outside of orbital mechanics nearly every question has opinionated answers. It's part of what we are. And this question has enough actual legal, political, and religious history to draw from for well formulated answers. Close votes are not super down votes.

@JBH How much rep does a person need to vote to reopen? I completely agree. Not to mention, the question doesn't even have any downvotes.

@JaycieBeveri, 500 rep you should be long past able to do it.

Voting to reopen per JBH

I got into a heated debate with Molot a few months ago and pretty ever since he shows up to downvote, delete, or close pretty much anything I post.

Nope, it looks like it takes 3000.