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Thread ID: 9212 | Posts: 2 | Started: 2003-08-22

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jeffersonian [OP]

2003-08-22 16:55 | User Profile

Original Analysis Available at: [url=http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/Chronicles/May2003/0503Dreisbach.html]Chronical Magazine[/url]

The following excerpt is from an analysis written by Daniel L. Dreisbach titled: How Thomas Jefferson’s “Wall of Separation” Redefined Church-State Law and Policy

**No metaphor in American letters has had a greater influence on law and policy than Thomas Jefferson’s “wall of separation between Church and State.” Many Americans accept it as a pithy description of the constitutionally prescribed Church-State arrangement, and it has become the locus classicus of the notion that the First Amendment separated religion and the civil state, thereby mandating a strictly secular polity.

More important, the judiciary has embraced this figurative phrase as a virtual rule of constitutional law and as the organizing theme of Church-State jurisprudence, even though the metaphor is not found in the Constitution. Writing for the U.S. Supreme Court in 1948, Justice Hugo L. Black asserted that the justices had “agreed that the First Amendment’s language, properly interpreted, had erected a wall of separation between Church and State.” Our democracy is threatened, Justice John Paul Stevens warned last term, “[w]henever we remove a brick from the wall that was designed to separate religion and government.”

What is the source of this figure of speech, and how has this symbol of strict separation between religion and public life come to dominate Church-State law and policy? I address these questions in my new book, Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation Between Church and State (2002).

On New Year’s Day, 1802, President Jefferson penned a missive to the Baptist Association of Danbury, Connecticut. The Baptists had written the new President a fan letter in October 1801, congratulating him on his election to the “chief Magistracy in the United States.” They celebrated his zealous advocacy for religious liberty and chastised those who had criticized him “as an enemy of religion[,] Law & good order.”

In 1800, Jefferson’s Federalist Party opponents, led by John Adams, dominated New England politics, and the Congregationalist Church was still legally established in Connecticut. The Danbury Baptists were outsiders—a beleaguered religious and political minority in a state where a Congregationalist-Federalist establishment dominated public life. They were drawn to Jefferson’s political cause because of his unflagging commitment to religious liberty.

In a carefully crafted reply endorsing the persecuted Baptists’ aspirations for religious liberty, the President wrote:

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.

The missive was written in the wake of the bitter presidential contest of 1800. Candidate Jefferson’s religion, or the alleged lack thereof, was a critical issue in the campaign. His Federalist foes vilified him as an “infidel” and “atheist.” The campaign rhetoric was so vitriolic that, when news of Jefferson’s election swept across the country, housewives in New England were seen burying family Bibles in their gardens or hiding them in wells because they fully expected the Holy Scriptures to be confiscated and burned by the new administration in Washington. (These fears resonated with Americans who had received alarming reports of the French Revolution, which Jefferson was said to support, and the widespread desecration of religious sanctuaries and symbols in France.) The Danbury letter was written to reassure pious Baptist constituents of Jefferson’s continuing commitment to their rights of conscience and to strike back at the Federalist-Congregationalist establishment in Connecticut for shamelessly vilifying him in the recent campaign.

Jefferson’s wall, according to conventional wisdom, represents a universal principle on the prudential and constitutional relationship between religion and the civil state. To the contrary, this wall had less to do with the separation between religion and all civil government than with the separation between federal and state governments on matters pertaining to religion (such as official proclamations of days of prayer, fasting, and thanksgiving). The “wall of separation” was a metaphoric construction of the First Amendment, which Jefferson time and again said imposed its restrictions on the federal government only (see, for example, Jefferson’s 1798 draft of the Kentucky Resolutions). In other words, the wall separated the federal regime on one side from state governments and religious authorities on the other.

How did this wall, limited in its jurisdictional application, come to exert such enormous influence on American jurisprudence? The political principle of separation between religion and politics began to gain currency among Jeffersonian partisans in the campaign of 1800, not to promote liberty but to silence the Federalist clergy who had denounced candidate Jefferson as an infidel and atheist. In the Danbury letter, Jefferson deftly transformed the political principle into the constitutional principle of separation between Church and State by equating the language of separation with the text of the First Amendment. The constitutional principle was eventually elevated to constitutional law by the Supreme Court in the mid-20th century, effectively recreating First Amendment doctrine.

By late January 1802, printed copies of Jefferson’s reply to the Danbury Baptists began appearing in New England newspapers. The letter, however, was not accessible to a wide audience until it was reprinted in the first major collection of Jefferson’s papers, published in the mid-19th century.

The phrase “wall of separation” entered the lexicon of American constitutional law in the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Reynolds v. United States (1879). Opining that the missive “may be accepted almost as an authoritative declaration of the scope and effect of the [First A]mendment thus secured,” the Court reprinted a flawed transcription of the Danbury letter. Most scholars agree that the wall metaphor played no role in the Court’s decision. Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite, who authored the opinion, was drawn to another clause in Jefferson’s text, but he could not edit the letter artfully to leave out the figurative phrase. The Chief Justice relied on Jefferson’s statement that the powers of civil government could reach men’s actions only, not their opinions. The Reynolds Court was focused on the legislative powers of Congress to criminalize the Mormon practice of polygamy and was apparently drawn to this passage because of the mistranscription of “legitimate powers” as “legislative powers.” But for this erroneous transcription, the Court might have had little or no interest in the Danbury letter, and the wall metaphor might not have entered the American legal lexicon.**

To my mind there is no debate. The Amendment was written specifically to Protect the Church, (the States) and the People from the Feds, not to protect the ”State" from the influence of religion. The separation was intended to keep the Feds out of the debate and reserved to the people or the states respectively the question of how religion should be practiced and observed. If Alabama wants to display the commandments, they must be granted that right. If the people of Alabama don't like them there, then have a referendum to remove them, but the Feds should stay the hell out of the debate.

Just as the intrusive imperial federal government has no business regulating any part of the education process, but has usurped this power from the states, so they have legislated from the bench this artificial protection, desired only by a minority of secularists.

This of course makes perfect sense in todays multi-cultural, PC world, other recent rulings by the enlightened on the bench indicate that the constitution provides a guarantee of the right to sodomy, preferences for some based on skin color or ethnicity, and also mandates that no reference to God be allowed in any public place, or even in the pledge of allegiance.

Hardly, I think, what the Founders had in mind.

Hilaire Belloc

2003-08-22 18:18 | User Profile

**Just as the intrusive imperial federal government has no business regulating any part of the education process, but has usurped this power from the states, so they have legislated from the bench this artificial protection, desired only by a minority of secularists. **

When I was an atheist and secularist, I was always PO about displays of religious symbols and/or religious expression. However as I matured I adopted an attitude quite common in the Far East towards religion. In this view: praying in a Buddhist temple doesn't mean you're a Buddhist, getting married in a Shinto temple a Shintoist does not one make, displaying a Hindu religious symbol in a Buddhist temple doesn't mean the temple endorses Hinduism. Likewise, saying "under God" in the pledge doesn't mean you believe in god, getting married in a Christian church doesn't mean you're a Christian, and a courtroom displaying the ten commandments doesn't mean this country is a theocracy!

I found out that once I adopted that form of attitude, I actually found it easier to get along with the world(which is predominately religious). It'd be wise if other atheists and secularists did the same!