by David Barton
Had Jefferson been free from the laws of his own state—that is, had he lived in a state such as Massachusetts, New Hampshire, or Connecticut—he likely would be universally hailed today as a bold civil rights leader, for his efforts and writings would certainly compare favorably to those of great civil rights advocates in the Northern states. In fact, if Jefferson had proposed his various pieces of legislation in those states, they would certainly have passed, and he would have been deemed a national civil rights hero. But his geography and circumstances doomed him to a different fate. Modern writers now refuse to recognize what previous generations openly acknowledged: Jefferson was a bold, staunch, and consistent advocate and defender of emancipation and civil rights.
LIE #5
Thomas Jefferson Advocated a Secular Public Square through the Separation of Church and State
Many of the lies about Jefferson, from education to the Bible, have been made to support one key overarching premise: Jefferson was secular and therefore his overall goal was a public sphere devoid of religion and from which religious expressions had been expunged. Typical of this oft-repeated charge is the claim that “Jefferson’s Presidential administration was probably the most purely secular this country has ever had.”1
But before determining whether Jefferson really was a secularist, it is important to define that term—a term that did not exist until modern times. By definition, secularist means:
• holding a system of political or social philosophy that rejects all forms of religious faith and worship
• embracing the view that public education and other matters of civil policy should be conducted without the introduction of a religious element2
• having indifference to, or a rejection or exclusion of, religion and religious considerations3
• believing that religious considerations should be excluded from civil affairs4
From what has thus far been presented from Jefferson’s own writings and actions, it is indisputable that he was not a secularist by the first three definitions. And this chapter will demonstrate that Jefferson definitely did not embrace the fourth point, that religious considerations should be excluded from civil affairs.
But for those who maintain otherwise, since they already believe that he was a secularist it is logical to further assert that Jefferson was also the father of the modern separation of church and state doctrine. In fact, they actually believe that Jefferson personally placed the separation of church and state into the First Amendment of the Constitution in order to secure public secularism. Consequently, these modern proponents claim:
Jefferson can probably best be considered the founding father of separation of church and state.5
Jefferson . . . is responsible for the precursor to the First Amendment that is almost universally interpreted as the constitutional justification for the separation of church and state.6
[T]he First Amendment was Jefferson’s top priority.7
Thomas Jefferson—the Father of the First Amendment.8
Others similarly claim that Jefferson is responsible for the First Amendment,9 and many modern courts also espouse this position—a trend that began in 1947 when the US Supreme Court asserted:
This Court has previously recognized that the provisions of the First Amendment, in the drafting and adoption of which . . . Jefferson played such [a] leading role.10
In subsequent cases the Court even described Jefferson was indeed “the architect of the First Amendment.”11 So firmly does the Court believe this that, in the six decades following its 1947 announcement, in every case addressing the removal of religious expressions from the public square it used Jefferson either directly or indirectly as its authority.12
Interestingly, however, the current heavy reliance on Jefferson as the primary constitutional voice on religion and the First Amendment is a modern phenomenon not a historic practice.13 Why? Because previous generations knew American history well enough to know better than to invoke Jefferson in such a manner.
Two centuries ago a Jefferson supporter penned a work foreshadowing modern claims by declaring Jefferson to be a leading constitutional influence. When Jefferson read that claim, he promptly instructed the author to correct that mistake, telling him:
One passage in the paper you enclosed me must be corrected. It is the following, “and all say it was yourself more than any other individual, that planned and established it,” i.e., the Constitution.14
What did Jefferson see wrong in stating the very claim repeated today? He bluntly explained:
I was in Europe when the Constitution was planned and never saw it till after it was established.15
A simple fact unknown or ignored by many of today’s writers and scholars is that Jefferson did not participate in framing the Constitution. He was not even in America when it was framed; so how could he be considered a primary influence on it? And he was also out of the country when the First Amendment and Bill of Rights were framed. As he openly acknowledged:
On receiving [the Constitution while in France], I wrote strongly to Mr. Madison, urging the want of provision [lack of provision] for the freedom of religion, freedom of the press, trial by jury, habeas corpus, the substitution of militia for a standing army, and an express reservation to the States of all rights not specifically granted to the Union. . . . This is all the hand I had in what related to the Constitution.16 (emphasis added)
Jefferson’s only role with the Constitution was to broadly call for a general Bill of Rights. While this is no insignificant thing, it was the same action taken by dozens of other Founders. So how can Jefferson be the father of the First Amendment if he never saw it until months after it was finished? Significantly, there were fifty-five individuals who framed the Constitution at the Constitutional Convention and ninety in the first federal Congress who framed the Bill of Rights; Jefferson was among neither group.
So why have so many courts and modern writers made him the singular go-to expert on religion clauses from documents in which he had no direct involvement? Why has he been given a position of “expert” that he himself properly refused? It is because he penned a letter containing the eight-word phrase “a wall of separation between church and state.” Courts and modern scholars have found that simple phrase, when divorced from its context, useful in providing the appearance of historical approval for their own efforts to secularize the public square.
Historically speaking, Jefferson was a latecomer to the separation phrase. The famous metaphor so often attributed to him was introduced in the 1500s by prominent ministers in England. And throughout the 1600s it was carried to America by Bible-oriented colonists who planted it deeply in the thinking of Americans, all long before Jefferson ever repeated it. So what was the historic origin of that now-famous phrase?
Jefferson was familiar with the writings of the Reverends John Wise, Joseph Priestly, and many others who divided the history of Christianity into three periods. 17 In Peroid I (called the Age of Purity), the followers of Jesus did just as He had taught them and retained Bible teaching uncorrupted. In Period II (the Age of Corruption), State leaders declared themselves also to be the Church leaders and seized control of the Church, assimilating it into the State and thus merging the two previously separate institutions into one. But in Period III (the Age of Reformation), Bible-centered leaders began loudly calling for reinstating the Bible-ordained separation between the two entities.
In the Scriptures, God had placed Moses over civil affairs and Aaron over spiritual ones. The nation was one, but the jurisdictions were two with separate leaders over each. In 2 Chronicles 26, when King Uzziah attempted to assume the duties of both State and Church, God Himself weighed in; He sovereignly and instantly struck down Uzziah, thus reaffirming the separation He had placed between the two institutions.
Period III Christian ministers understood these Biblical precedents and urged a return to the original model. As early Methodist bishop Charles Galloway affirmed:
The miter and the cro
wn should never encircle the same brow. The crozier and the scepter should never be wielded by the same hand.18
Of the four items specifically mentioned—the miter, crown, crozier, and scepter—two reference the Church and two the State. Concerning the Church, the miter was the headgear worn by the high priest in Jewish times (see Exodus 28:3–4, 35–37) and later by popes, cardinals, and bishops. The crozier was the shepherd’s crook carried by Church officials during special ceremonies. Pertaining to the State, the crown was the symbol of authority placed upon the heads of kings, and the scepter was held in their hand as an emblem of their extensive power (see the book of Esther). Therefore, the metaphor that “the miter and the crown should never encircle the same brow” meant that the same person should not be the head of the Church and the head of the State. Galloway’s declaration that “the crozier and the scepter should never be wielded by the same hand” meant that authority over the Church and authority over the State should never be given to the same individual.
Galloway’s phrases not only provided clear and easily understandable visual pictures, but also referenced specific historical incidents—as when Period II Roman Emperor Otto III (980–1002 AD) constructed his king’s crown to fit atop the miter worn by Church officials.19 This type of jurisdictional blending had been common in England before American colonization, as when the English Parliament passed civil laws stipulating who could take communion in the church or who could be a minister of the Gospel, thus governmentally controlling what should have been purely ecclesiastical matters.20
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.
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
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
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
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.
