The Jefferson Lies (19 page)

It is important to note that it was not secular civil leaders who emphasized a separation of the Church from the control of the State but rather Bible-based ministers. In fact, it was English Reformation clergyman Reverend Richard Hooker who first used the phrase during the reign of England's King Henry VIII, calling for a “separation of . . . Church and Commonwealth.”
²¹
(Recall that Henry had wanted a divorce, but when the Church refused to give it, he simply started his own national church—the Anglican Church—and gave himself a divorce under his new state-established doctrines.
²²
)

Other Bible-centered ministers also spoke out against the intrusion of the State into the jurisdiction of the Church, including the Reverend John Greenwood (1556–1593) who started the church attended by many of the Pilgrims when they still lived in England.

121

Queen Elizabeth was head over both the State and the Church at that time, but Greenwood asserted “that there could be but one head to the church and that head was
not
the Queen, but Christ!”
²³
He was eventually executed for “denying Her Majesty's ecclesiastical supremacy and attacking the existing ecclesiastical order.”
²⁴

Then, when Parliament passed a law requiring that if “any of her Majesty's subjects deny the Queen's ecclesiastical supremacy . . . they shall be committed to prison without bail,”
²⁵
most of the Pilgrims fled from England to Holland. From Holland they went to America where they boldly advocated separation of church and state, affirming that government had no right to “compel religion, to plant churches by power, and to force a submission to ecclesiastical government by laws and penalties.”
²⁶

Many other reformation-minded ministers and colonists traveling from Europe to America also openly advocated the institutional separation of State and Church, including the Reverends Roger Williams (1603–1683),
²⁷
John Wise (1652–1725),
²⁸
William Penn (1614–1718),
²⁹
and many others. In fact, they often did so in language even more articulate than the original Reformers.
³⁰

The entire history of the separation doctrine centered around preventing the State from taking control of the Church, and meddling with or controlling its doctrines or punishing its religious expressions. Throughout history, it had not been the Church that had seized the State but just the opposite. Furthermore, the separation doctrine had never been used to secularize the public square. As affirmed by early Quaker leader Will Wood, “The separation of Church and State does not mean the exclusion of God, righteousness, morality, from the State.”
³¹

Early Methodist bishop Charles Galloway agreed: “The separation of the Church from the State did not mean the severance of the State from God, or of the nation from Christianity.”
³²

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The philosophy of keeping the State limited and at arm's length from regulating or punishing religious practices and expressions was planted deeply into American thinking. Eventually, it was nationally enshrined in the First Amendment, which states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the Free Exercise thereof.”

The first part of the Amendment is now called the establishment clause and the latter part, the free exercise clause. The language of both is clear; and both clauses were pointed solely at the State not the Church. Notice that the establishment clause prohibited the
State
from enforcing religious conformity, and the free exercise clause ensured that the
State
would protect—rather than suppress, as it currently does—citizens' rights of conscience and religious expression. Both clauses are prohibitions only on the power of
Congress
(i.e., the government), not on religious individuals or organizations.

This was the meaning of “separation of church and state” with which Jefferson was intimately familiar, and it was this interpretation, and not the modern perversion of it, that he repeatedly reaffirmed in his writings and practices. This is especially evident in his famous letter containing the separation phrase. Consider the background of that letter and why Jefferson wrote it.

When Jefferson, the head of the Anti-Federalists, became president in 1801, his election was particularly well received by Baptists. This political disposition was understandable, for from the early settlement of Rhode Island in the 1630s to the time of the writing of the federal Constitution in 1787, the Baptists had often found their free exercise limited by state-established government power. Baptist ministers had often been beaten, imprisoned, and even faced death by those from the government church,
³³
so it was not surprising that they strongly opposed centralized government power. For this reason the predominately Baptist state of Rhode Island refused to send delegates to the Constitutional Convention;
³⁴
and the Baptists were the only denomination in which a majority of its clergy across the nation voted against the ratification of the Constitution.
³⁵

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Jefferson's election as an Anti-Federalist opposed to a strong central government elated the Baptists. They were very familiar with Jefferson's record not only of disestablishing the official church in Virginia but also of championing the cause of religious freedom for Baptists and other denominations.
³⁶
Not surprisingly, therefore, he received numerous letters of congratulations from Baptist organizations.
³⁷

One of them was penned on October 7, 1801, by the Baptist Association of Danbury, Connecticut. Their letter began with an expression of gratitude to God for Jefferson's election followed by prayers of blessing for him. They then expressed grave concern over the proposed government protections for their free exercise. As they explained:

Our sentiments are uniformly on the side of religious liberty—that religion is at all times and places a matter between God and individuals; that no man ought to suffer in name, person, or effects on account of his religious opinions; that the legitimate power of civil government extends no further than to punish the man who works ill to his neighbor. But sir, our constitution of government is not specific. . . . Religion is considered as the first object of legislation and therefore what religious privileges we enjoy (as a minor part of the State) we enjoy as favors granted and not as inalienable rights.
³⁸

These ministers were troubled that their “religious privileges” were being guaranteed by the apparent generosity of government.

Many citizens today do not grasp their concern. Why would ministers object to the State guaranteeing their enjoyment of religious privileges? Because to the far-sighted Danbury Baptists, the mere presence of governmental language protecting their free exercise of religion suggested that it had become a government-granted right (and thus alienable) rather than a God-given one (and hence inalienable). Fearing that the inclusion of such language in governing documents might someday cause the government wrongly to believe that since it had “granted” the freedom of religious expression it therefore had the authority to regulate it, the Danbury Baptists had strenuously objected. They believed that government should not interfere with any public religious expression unless, as they told Jefferson, that religious practice caused someone to genuinely “work ill to his neighbor.”
³⁹

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The Danbury Baptists were writing to Jefferson fully understanding that he was an ally of their viewpoint, not an adversary of it. After all, three years earlier in his famous Kentucky Resolution of 1798 Jefferson had already emphatically declared:

[N]o power over the freedom of religion . . . [is] delegated to the United States by the Constitution [the First Amendment].
⁴⁰

Jefferson believed that the federal government had
no
authority to interfere with, limit, regulate, or prohibit public religious expressions—a position he repeated on many subsequent occasions:

In matters of religion I have considered that its free exercise is placed by the Constitution independent of the powers of the general [federal] government.
⁴¹

[O]ur excellent Constitution . . . has not placed our religious rights under the power of any public functionary.
⁴²

None of these or any other statements of Jefferson contain even the slightest suggestion that religion should be removed from the public square or that the square should be secularized, but rather only that the government could not limit or regulate it—which is what had concerned the Danbury Baptists. Understanding this, Jefferson replied to them on January 1, 1802, assuring them that they had nothing to fear: the government would not meddle with their religious expressions.

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Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God; that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship; that the legislative powers of government reach actions only and 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 and State. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties. I reciprocate your kind prayers for the protection and blessing of the common Father and Creator of man, and tender you, for yourselves and your religious association, assurances of my high respect and esteem.
⁴³

The separation metaphor was a phrase already commonly used and well understood by the government-oppressed Baptists and their ministers, and Jefferson used it to assure them that the government would protect rather than impede their religious beliefs and expressions. As James Adams noted:

Jefferson's reference to a “wall of separation between Church and State” . . . was not formulating a secular principle to banish religion from the public arena. Rather he was trying to keep government from darkening the doors of Church.
⁴⁴

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The first occasion in which the US Supreme Court invoked the separation metaphor from Jefferson's letter was in 1878 when the Court affirmed that the purpose of separation was to protect rather than limit public religious expressions.
⁴⁵
In fact, after reprinting lengthy portions of Jefferson's letter and reviewing its general prohibition against federal intrusion into religious beliefs and the free exercise of religion, the Court concluded:

[I]t [Jefferson's letter] may be accepted almost as an authoritative declaration of the scope and effect of the Amendment thus secured. Congress was deprived of all legislative power over mere [religious] opinion, but was left free to reach actions which were in violation of social duties or subversive of good order.
⁴⁶

Then to affirm Jefferson's point that there were only a handful of religious expressions against which the federal government could legitimately interfere, the Court quoted from his famous Virginia Statute to establish that:

[T]he rightful purposes of civil government are for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order. In th[is] . . . is found the true distinction between what properly belongs to the Church and what to the State.
⁴⁷

Notice that in Jefferson's view, the only religious expressions that the government could hamper were acts “against peace and good order,” “injurious to others,” acts “subversive of good order,” or acts by “the man who works ill to his neighbor.”

That Court (and others
⁴⁸
) then identified a handful of actions that, if perpetrated in the name of religion, the government did have legitimate reason to limit, including bigamy, concubinage, incest, child sacrifice, infanticide, parricide, and other similar crimes. But the government was
not
to impede traditional religious expressions in public, such as public prayer, public display of religious symbols, public use of Scriptures, acknowledgement of God in public events, and so on. In short, the separation of Church and State existed not to remove or secularize the free exercise of religion but rather to preserve and protect it, regardless of whether it was exercised in private or public.

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This was the universal understanding of separation of Church and State—until the Court's landmark ruling in 1947 in
Everson v. Board of Education
in which it announced it would reverse this historic meaning.
⁴⁹
In that case the Court cited only Jefferson's eight-word separation metaphor, completely severing the phrase from its historical context and the rest of Jefferson's clearly worded letter, and then expressed for the first time that the phrase existed not to protect religion in the public square but to remove it.

The next year, in 1948, the Court repeated its rhetoric of the previous year declaring: