One of my pet peeves is the recurrent revisionist nonsense trotted out by humanistic secularists claiming that the concept of the separation of church and state is enshrined somewhere in the Constitution. Let me clear up this misconception. It isn't. It never has been. Don't believe me? Sucks to be you - I have proof.
The following is taken from a research paper I wrote last year for a Historical Research Methods class, offered here as evidence against the revisionist case:
There is a concept prominent in modern American constitutional thought that has reached its prominence not as a legacy handed down from the Founding Fathers, but as a corruption of their primary intentions; a revisionist myth based on the most fragmentary evidence and the most blatant disregard for the Founders’ actual words and admonitions. This concept is known to us as the Separation of Church and State, and in its present incarnation, it is doing much more to inhibit and eliminate freedom of religion in the United States than it is for protecting that freedom – one of the first freedoms the Founders sought to guarantee.
An atheist co-worker of mine has a bumper sticker on his car which reads: “Freedom of Religion Means Freedom FROM Religion.” This expresses the heart of the current confusion in the public understanding of the separation principle: a simple linguistic misapplication which substitutes the meaning of the preposition from for that of the preposition of. By this simple change, the entire meaning of the phrase is transformed. ‘Freedom of religion’ indicates that the practice of religion itself enjoys freedom; in other words, those Americans who so choose to practice religion are free to do so without restriction by the government. However, if you insert the word from (or merely its definition, as in the growing public perception), the new phrase ‘freedom from religion’ denotes something entirely different. This indicates that religion is something people need to be protected from, or liberated from, or in its most literal sense, freed from. It casts organized religion and personal faith together as something detrimental to the common good that should be excised from modern society.
Closer investigation reveals that not only were the Founders aware of the definitive difference between the two prepositions (which is why they chose one which meant of rather than one meaning from in the First Amendment)[1], they were also acutely aware of the difference between religion and faith; religion being the organized practices, rituals and canons undertaken regularly by people who profess a belief in God or a Creator, and faith being the individual belief and trust in that God. The intent of the Founders in wording the First Amendment was to ensure that the new federal government would not be allowed to dictate to the people any one officially state sanctioned religion; not that it would be charged with removing all religion and personal professions of faith from the public sector. The two principles are wildly divergent, and could only spring from the same origins with the help of revisionism on the one hand and suppression on the other.
The misconception of the separation principle began its slow creep toward public acceptance not in the First Amendment, but in a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to a group of Baptists in Danbury, Connecticut on New Year’s Day, 1802. The Danbury Baptists had written to Jefferson to congratulate him on his election to the presidency and on his support for religious liberty – at the time, the Congregationalist Church was the most dominant church in Connecticut, rendering the Baptists outsiders and giving them cause for concern that their own denomination could be threatened.[2] In his response, Jefferson made the following statement in an attempt to alleviate the Baptists’ concerns:
Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that 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 & State.[3]
In reading the entire paragraph, it is easy to see that Jefferson did not mean that religion should be removed from public life, as is often claimed today. He was merely pointing out the intent of the First Amendment to keep government out of the business of establishing any official religion, while at the same time preventing the government from prohibiting the free practice of any religion the people chose to pursue.
Practitioners of revisionist history often use partial quotes, contextual misdirection and incorrect definition to support their preferred outcome. This case is a perfect example, where revisionists focus only on the figurative phrase “a wall of separation between Church & State”, and attribute that phrase (minus the context in which it was written) as the primary supporting evidence for the constitutionality of their claims – despite the problematic fact that the phrase itself appears nowhere in the Constitution.[4]
Jefferson’s words were not, in fact, part of the Constitution, nor were they issued in an executive order; yet somehow they found their way into the American courts as the foundation of perceived Constitutional precedent. The means for this transition first came about in the 1878 Supreme Court ruling in Reynolds v. United States, where Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite referenced Jefferson’s letter in pointing out the legitimate government power over men’s actions, but not over their opinions.[5] Although Waite did not refer to the separation of church and state, by including Jefferson’s letter in the ruling, he inadvertently left it open for future citation by other courts who would make it the foundation of their arguments encroaching on American religious freedom.
The next judicial leap in the journey of the separation analogy was taken by the Supreme Court in its ruling on Everson v. Board of Education in 1947. Justice Hugo Black quoted Jefferson’s Danbury letter in the majority opinion, asserting that Jefferson’s ‘wall of separation’ analogy was the direct intention of the First Amendment.[6] Ironically, Justice Black, writing the majority opinion, was supporting the right of parents in New Jersey to be reimbursed by the local school board for bus fares incurred by their children riding to and from their Catholic schools, since the same school board also reimbursed parents for their children’s fares to and from public schools. Judging from the court’s ruling, it would seem that Justice Black’s opinion would strongly affirm the right of freedom of religion, but it was his wording in the opinion that would later find popularity among opponents of that freedom.
Justice Black wrote:
The First Amendment has erected a wall between church and state. That wall must be kept high and impregnable. We could not approve the slightest breach. New Jersey has not breached it here.[7]
The most common references to Black’s quote only include the first three sentences, leaving off the fourth entirely. By doing so, they ignore the court’s assertion that allowing government to pay bus fares for parochial as well as public school students did not in any way interfere with the First Amendment. Instead, they focus on the figurative rhetoric of the first three sentences and use them as the cornerstone of their arguments for total separation of religion from secular life in America.
Writing for the opposition in Everson, Justice Wiley B. Rutledge used even harsher language that would also be used to great effect in the future by strict separationists. Referring to the purpose of the First Amendment, Rutledge argued:
The Amendment's purpose was not to strike merely at the official establishment of a single sect, creed or religion, outlawing only a formal relation such as had prevailed in England and some of the colonies. Necessarily it was to uproot all such relationships. But the object was broader than separating church and state in this narrow sense. It was to create a complete and permanent separation of the spheres of religious activity and civil authority by comprehensively forbidding every form of public aid or support for religion.[8]
Is Justice Rutledge’s characterization of the First Amendment accurate? A look at the full text of the Amendment offers the answer:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.[9]
If the Amendment’s purpose was to “uproot all such relationships”, that purpose seems suspicious by its absence in the Amendment itself. There is no indication in its wording of any obligation for active uprooting of religion from public life; simply a statement that Congress is not allowed to make laws establishing religion or restricting its free exercise. Rutledge seems to be taking liberties with the actual wording of the First Amendment by inserting his own opinions, based on the analogy in Jefferson’s letter. This position runs at cross purposes to the actual intent of the Founding Fathers.
What then, was the intent of the Founders? One might reasonably assume that if their intent had been the uprooting of all religious relationships with the state, they would have mentioned that intent more explicitly, but that is not the case at all. Of the ninety men involved in framing the First Amendment, not one ever made any mention of the ‘separation’ phrase during the discussions and debates leading up to the completion of the amendment.[10]
John Adams made his view on the matter explicitly clear in a speech to a group of Massachusetts militia in 1798 when he said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”[11] These hardly sound like the words of a person convinced of the need for uprooting religion from public life. The Continental Congress shared Adams’ sentiments, passing a resolution on October 12, 1778, which stated:
Whereas true religion and good morals are the only solid foundations of public liberty and happiness: Resolved, That it be, and it is hereby earnestly recommended to the several States to take the most effectual measures for the encouragement thereof.[12]
Perhaps even more telling than these statements are those from the original source of the ‘separation’ clause that has caused such debate and confusion – Thomas Jefferson himself. Jefferson is commonly characterized as an atheist or at least as an irreligious humanist, but he states in his own words, “I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus…”[13] Jefferson was a man of faith who felt strongly about the place of religion and faith in public life. This conviction is made clear in a letter Jefferson wrote to Moses Robinson:
The Christian religion, when divested of the rags they [clergy] have enveloped it, and brought to the original purity and simplicity of its benevolent institutor, is a religion of all others, most friendly to liberty, science, and the freest expansion of the human mind.[14]
Thomas Jefferson agreed with the majority of the Founding Fathers that religion and faith have a valuable role to play in public, secular life. The Founders provide us with a multitude of papers, books, letters and legislation that give evidence to that effect, but revisionists have managed to base their separation argument on a single analogy in a private letter written by Jefferson, supported by later Supreme Court opinions written by justices taking broad license in interpreting that analogy as part of the Constitution – which it was not.
Historian David Hackett Fischer warns against the misuse of analogy in historical writing, and that warning applies equally well to its misuse as an interpretive tool in the law: “Analogy is a useful tool of historical understanding only as an auxiliary to proof. It is never a substitute for it.”[15] Similarly, Justice William Rehnquist, dissenting in the 1984 Supreme Court case of Wallace v. Jaffree, bemoaned the faulty historical practices involved in relying on Jefferson’s Danbury letter:
It is impossible to build sound constitutional doctrine upon a mistaken understanding of constitutional history, but unfortunately the Establishment Clause has been expressly freighted with Jefferson's misleading metaphor for nearly 40 years. Thomas Jefferson was of course in France at the time the constitutional Amendments known as the Bill of Rights were passed by Congress and ratified by the States. His letter to the Danbury Baptist Association was a short note of courtesy, written 14 years after the Amendments were passed by Congress. He would seem to any detached observer as a less than ideal source of contemporary history as to the meaning of the Religion Clauses of the First Amendment. . . . The “wall of separation between church and State” is a metaphor based on bad history, a metaphor which has proved useless as a guide to judging. It should be frankly and explicitly abandoned.[16]
Proponents of a strict policy of separation between church and state in American life have embraced the separation analogy at the expense of the historical evidence to the contrary, and a core principle of the First Amendment – our freedom of religion – is slowly eroding because of it.
Copyright M. Morehouse 2010
ENDNOTES
[1] U.S. Constitution, amend. 1.
[2] Daniel L. Dreisbach, “Origins and Dangers of the “Wall of Separation” Between Church and State.” Imprimis 35 (October 2006): 2.
[3] Thomas Jefferson, Political Writings. ed. Joyce Appleby and Terence Ball. (Port Chester, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 396-397.
[4] David Barton, Original Intent: The Courts, the Constitution, & Religion. ( Aledo, TX: Wallbuilder Press, 2004), 20.
[5] Reynolds v. United States, 98 U.S. 145 (1878).
[6] Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U. S. 1 (1947).
[9] U.S. Constitution, amend. 1.
[11] John Adams, The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States. ed. Charles Francis Adams. Vol. 9. (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1856), 229.
[12] Journals of the American Congress from 1774-1778. Vol. 3. (Washington: Way and Gideon, 1823.) 85.
[13] John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, Ye Will Say I am no Christian: The Thomas Jefferson/John Adams Correspondence on Religion, Morals and Values. ed. Bruce Braden. (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2006), 241.
[15] David Hackett Fischer, Historian’s Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought. (New York: HarperPerennial, 1970), 255.
[16] Wallace v. Jaffree, 472 U. S. 38 (1984).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adams, John. The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States. ed. Charles Francis Adams. Vol. 9. Boston. Little, Brown and Company, 1856. Available from http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/2107/161247; accessed 1 March 2009.
Adams, John, and Thomas Jefferson. Ye Will Say I am no Christian: The Thomas Jefferson/John Adams Correspondence on Religion, Morals and Values. ed. Bruce Braden. Amherst, NY. Prometheus Books, 2006.
Barton, David. Original Intent: The Courts, the Constitution, & Religion. Aledo, Texas. Wallbuilder Press, 2004.
Dreisbach, Daniel L. “Origins and Dangers of the “Wall of Separation” Between Church and State.” Imprimis 35, no. 10. (2006).
Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U. S. 1 (1947).
Fischer, David Hackett. Historian’s Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought. New York: HarperPerennial, 1970.
Jefferson, Thomas. Political Writings. ed. Joyce Appleby and Terence Ball. Port Chester, NY. Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Reynolds v. United States, 98 U. S. 145 (1878).
United States. The Constitution of the United States of America. Washington, D.C. U.S. Government Printing Office, 1934.
United States. Journals of the American Congress from 1774-1778. Vol. 3. Washington, D.C. Way and Gideon, 1823. Available from http://www.archive.org/details/journalsamerica01statgoog; accessed 10 March 10, 2009.
Wallace v. Jaffree, 472 U. S. 38 (1984).
Recent Comments