Separation of Church and State—The Misleading Metaphor

David Barton
In 1947, the Supreme Court declared, “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.” Actually, the “separation of church and state” phrase which they invoked is not found in any of our official government documents. It was taken from letters between President Thomas Jefferson and the Baptist Association of Danbury, Conn.

On Oct. 7, 1801, the Danbury Baptists wrote the new president a letter in which they expressed concern over the First Amendment and its guarantee of the “free exercise” of religion. This suggested to them that the right of religious expression was government-given (thus alienable) rather than God-given (hence inalienable), and therefore the government might someday attempt to regulate religious expression. They strenuously objected to this possibility unless someone’s religious practice caused him to “work ill to his neighbor.”

President Jefferson shared their concern. Here are a few of the numerous declarations he made about the constitutional inability of the federal government to regulate, restrict or interfere with religious expression.;

Having witnessed the tendency of government to encroach upon the free exercise of religion, President Jefferson had written to Noah Webster in 1790, stating he had no intention of allowing the government to limit, restrict, regulate or interfere with public religious practices. He believed, along with the other founders, that the First Amendment had been enacted only to prevent the federal establishment of a national denomination. In his reply to the Danbury Baptists on Jan. 1, 1802, he assured them that the free exercise of religion would never be interfered with by the federal government.

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.

The president’s reference to “natural rights” reaffirmed his belief that religious liberties were inalienable rights. “Natural rights” included “that which the Books of the Law and the Gospel do contain”—that is, what God Himself had guaranteed to man in the Scriptures.

When the president assured the Baptists that by following their “natural rights” they would violate no social duty, he was affirming to them that the free exercise of religion was their inalienable, God-given right and therefore was protected from federal regulation or interference.

Doubting whether America could survive if we ever lost knowledge of the source of our inalienable rights, he asked: “Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure if we have lost the only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath?”

The Meaning of Separation

President Jefferson believed that God, not government, was the author and source of our rights and that government was to be prevented from interfering with those rights. The “wall” of the Danbury letter was not to limit religious activities in public. It was to limit the power of the government to prohibit or interfere with those expressions.

Earlier courts long understood President Jefferson’s intent. When his Danbury letter was invoked by the Supreme Court in 1878, unlike today’s courts which publish only his eight-word separation phrase, that earlier court published a large segment of his letter and concluded:

Coming as this does from an acknowledged leader of the advocates of the measure, it [President 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.

The court then summarized President Jefferson’s intent for “separation of church and state”: “The rightful purposes of civil government are for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order. In this…is found the true distinction between what properly belongs to the church and what to the State.”

That court identified actions that the government did have legitimate reason to intrude upon. Those activities included human sacrifice, polygamy, infanticide, promotion of immorality, etc. Such acts, even in the name of religion, would be stopped by the government since they were “subversive of good order” and “overt acts against peace.”

However the government was never to interfere with traditional religious practices—public prayer, use of the Scriptures, public acknowledgements of God, etc.—outlined in “the Books of the Law and the Gospel.”

Original Intent

If President Jefferson’s letter is to be used today, let its context be clearly given. Earlier courts viewed his Danbury letter for what it was: a personal, private letter to a specific group. There is probably no other instance in America’s history where the words of an individual in a private letter—words clearly divorced from their context—have become the sole authorization for a national policy. A proper analysis of President Jefferson’s views must include his numerous other statements on the First Amendment—not just that of the Danbury letter.

For example, in addition to statements previously noted, he also declared that the “power to prescribe any religious exercise…must rest with the States.” Federal courts ignore this declaration and choose rather to misuse his separation phrase to strike down scores of state laws which encourage or facilitate public religious expressions. Such rulings are a direct violation of the words of the very one from whom the courts claim to derive their policy.

They should consider the intent of the founding fathers who framed the First Amendment. Their months of discussions and debates are recorded in the Congressional Record, and the phrase “separation of church and state” never occurred. It seems logical that if this had been the intent of the First Amendment, at least one of those 90 would have mentioned it. None did.

“Separation of church and state” has been described as a “misleading metaphor” by Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist since the current meaning is almost exactly the opposite of what was originally intended.

As Christians we need to pray for our country and for those in authority to come to the knowledge of the truth. Join us in spreading the message of the founders’ original intent for the First Amendment.

David Barton, nationally known author and public speaker, is the founder and president of WallBuilders, a pro-family organization which seeks to educate grass-roots society to rebuild America’s constitutional, moral and religious foundations. For more information go to www.wallbuilders.com, call 817-441-6044 or write to WallBuilders, P.O. Box 397, Aledo, TX 76008-0397.

Comments

By Patrick Oden on November 10th, 2009 at 10:03 am

Thomas Jefferson did not believe that any god was the author of our rights. Natural rights are not the same as so-called natural law that is promoted by Christian revisionists. Natural rights comes from utilitarianism, legal positivism, and social contract. These political philosophies to which Jefferson and Madison were attracted really started making headway in the ideas of Mill, Bentham, and Hume, among others. Religious liberty has little or nothing to do with Christianity. The U.S. could have been founded as a Christian nation, but the founders chose to strip all of the public and political authority away from the churches in the vast majority of cases. A prime example is Jefferson’s and Madison’s Virginia statutes on religious liberty and disestablishing the state churches.

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