The Times and the Scriptures  Backgrounder #12

The Separation of Church and State (4-03 version)

(Note: The full text of the exchange of letters between President Jefferson and the Danbury Baptists can be viewed at The Times and the Scriptures website, www.timesandscriptures.com, by clicking the “Links” page and looking under “American Christian History.”  You can even access Jefferson’s handwritten original copy.)

The Baptist Association of Danbury, CT wrote a respectful letter to President Thomas Jefferson and received a gracious personal reply.The churches were worried that their religious liberties, which appeared by the First Amendment to be “granted” by a man-made Constitution, could later be limited by the government if it so chose.

President Jefferson reassured his correspondents that their religious freedoms were God-given, and that the First Amendment merely sought to create a barrier against the federal government tampering with those liberties.  The amendment had built, he wrote, “a wall of separation between Church and State.”  He called this an “expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience.”  The amendment clearly meant that law-abiding churches and individuals were to be utterly free to practice their religion without disadvantage or interference from the federal government. Many of Jefferson’s later writings re-confirm that this was his meaning.  For example, in his Second Inaugural Address (1805) he said the Constitution had rendered the “free exercise” of religion “independent of the powers of the General [federal] Government.”

(See also Backgrounder #21, Founders Breached the Famous “Wall.”)

Jefferson’s Danbury letter was written in 1802.  Over the next 145 years it was cited in only one court case, probably because it was a private correspondence, not a judicial utterance.  Then suddenly in 1947 the now-famous phrase appeared in the Supreme Court’s Everson v Board of Education decision, where the Court reached for the first time into religious matters involving the states, not the federal government.  The eight words were quoted without context, and used to support a proposition opposite from what Jefferson had said.  The church, now, was to be kept at a distance from the state.

The words, used in their new sense, rapidly became favorites for judicial activists (judges—and their supporters—who think significant changes in law should come about by court decisions rather than by legislation).  A concerned state Supreme Court justice in 1958 warned that if his colleagues did not stop speaking of “separation of church and state,” people would start thinking it was part of the U.S. Constitution.  Indeed, a later poll found 67% of Americans thinking exactly that.  Ironically, the phrase in its Russian equivalent did appear, word for word, in the old Soviet Union’s constitution.

Thus, a seeming impossibility came to pass.  A non-constitutional phrase was turned on its head, invested with pseudo-constitutional authority, and used time after time to limit the influence and freedoms of Christianity in America, all in a very few decades. 

Ardent admirers of this new separation may confess that the words “separation of church and state” do not appear anywhere in the Constitution or any other founding document, but insist that the idea is implied there.  We can test this notion in at least three ways.  We could examine the Founding Fathers’ carefully recorded discussions that led to formulating the amendment, and we could look at the religion-friendly practices of those same men before, during and after the Constitutional Convention.

T&S Backgrounder #12, Separation of Church and State, PAGE 2

The third approach is to actually read the First Amendment, particularly the “establishment clause” that supposedly contains the separation principle, and see if we can detect such a cleverly-embedded doctrine.  Here is the relevant section:  “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, nor prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”  The “free exercise” clause, by the way, gets remarkably little attention from the modern-day separationists.

Notice first that in a normal reading of these words, the federal Congress is the only entity prohibited from doing anything.  Notice next that the only thing Congress is prevented from doing is making a certain kind of law.  That much is plain.  Defining “an establishment of religion” is only slightly more challenging, because the Founders frequently used that terminology in other writings.  Christianity was clearly the prevailing world view upon which the Founders had built the Republic (See Backgrounder #3, Government and the Uniqueness of Christianity.)  But their intent was that no denomination should be preferred and treated by the federal government as an “established” (state-supported) religion in the European sense.  Civil and church governments, although derived from the same divine source (See Backgrounder #1, Government:  A Creation of God), were to be different institutions.

It also helps to know that many individual states had “established church” arrangements before and after the U.S. Constitution was ratified and amended. Whether or not this was good, it proves that the Founders applied the First Amendment only to the federal government.

After 1947, as the phrase “separation of church and state” took its place in American liberal folk wisdom, its meaning ballooned. “Church” has apparently grown to mean virtually any visible religious activity, especially Christian activity, even on the part of a single individual as harmless as a kindergarten child.  The meaning of “state” has expanded to include public schools, parks, buildings, cemeteries, license plates, street corners, etc.

For centuries before and after the formation of the United States, the free public exercise of biblical faith was encouraged as a virtue in America. For generations, civil government’s attitude toward God-honoring practices was supportive, in the spirit of Psalm 119:46, 138:4 and 148:11-13, and Daniel 4:1-3, 37.  In the last half-century, by contrast, it has been more reminiscent of the “keep quiet” scriptures like Luke 19:37-40 and Acts 4:18 and 5:28-29.

Perhaps Americans who value the Constitution’s original intent should demand that innovators try to pass legitimate laws or amendments if they want to revolutionize the United States.  (See Backgrounder #9, How Do We Know What Is Constitutional?)  For example, they might draft an amendment that proposes exactly what they mean by “separation of church and state” and see if they could get it passed.  This approach would show infinitely more integrity than the current policy of creating historic and legal precedents where there are none.

For further study:
David Barton, The Changing First Amendment (audio tape, 1996) WallBuilders Press, PO Box 397, Aledo, TX  76008 www.wallbuilders.com

David Barton, Original Intent, 1997, WallBuilders Press, PO Box 397, Aledo, TX 76008  www.wallbuilders.com

Rick Scarborough, Enough is Enough, 1996, Whitaker House, 580 Pittsburgh St, Springdale, PA  15144

John W. Whitehead, The Separation Illusion, 1977, Mott Media, Box 236, Milford, MI 48042

NOTE TO TEACHERS:
The Reading Quiz and Vocabulary Quiz associated with this Backgrounder can be seen at the Academics page.