Many Americans know that the Supreme Court has stated that the framers intended the Establishment Clause “to erect ‘a wall of separation between Church and State.’” A smaller number know that the court was quoting a letter from President Thomas Jefferson to Baptists in Danbury, Connecticut—a bit of bad history, since Jefferson’s idiosyncratic views did not fairly reflect the consensus on church-state relations at the time of the framing. A still smaller number know that the metaphor of the wall goes back even further, to Roger Williams, who adapted it from the Book of Isaiah.
But hardly anyone knows the very interesting story that historian Don Drakeman (Church, State, and Original Intent) tells in a recent paper. In “Why Do We Think the American Framers Wanted to Separate Church and State?,” delivered at Oxford’s Rothmere American Institute last month, Drakeman explains that Chief Justice Morrison Waite first used the metaphor in Reynolds v. United States (1878), a case involving a ban on polygamy. According to Drakeman, Waite came upon the metaphor more or less by accident. Waite happened to live next door to the eminent American historian George Bancroft, for whom Jefferson was a hero. Waite consulted Bancroft about the case, and Bancroft advised that, if Waite wanted to know the framers’ views on establishment, he should consult Jefferson:
The Chief Justice then went to the library and skimmed through the index to Jefferson’s collected works. There, he discovered an 1802 letter, in which Jefferson said that the First Amendment built a “wall of separation between church and state.” This statement had been buried for nearly 80 years until Chief Justice Waite unearthed it and cemented it into the foundations of church-state jurisprudence. Bancroft, by the way, got a thank-you note, but no visible credit for creating the Jeffersonian First Amendment.
So much for good originalism. Indeed, so much for ex parte communications about a pending lawsuit! But there it is. Drakeman’s essay is a delight. Check it out here.
Mark Movsesian is Director of the Center for Law and Religion at St. John’s University.
February 13th, 2013 | 11:58 am
Two additional points are worth noting here.
First, Jefferson got the metaphor from Roger Williams, who was describing the need for a protective wall for the church to keep it from being corrupted by the world.
Second, Jefferson’s letter was in response to the Danbury Baptists, who were concerned that he would use the power of the government to begin dictating requirements to the church.
Jefferson’s response, therefore, is in the context of concerns about government entanglement in religious institutions. I have my American Government and Religion & Politics students read both the Baptists’ letter and Jefferson’s response, so they have the whole story.
February 14th, 2013 | 5:39 am
Is Drakeman a historian? His bio calls him an entrepreneur and a venture capitalist. Not to say venture capitalists can’t venture into writing history, but there’s a difference between a venture capitalist writing history and a historian.
February 14th, 2013 | 9:02 am
It appears he has a PhD in religion and lectures adjunct in politics department at Princeton. More important he has a book published by Cambridge Univ press and this particular talk was presented to a community of scholars at Oxford.
So an unconventional background for a scholar but no reason to question his bona fides.
February 18th, 2013 | 10:20 pm
Drakeman tells an interesting story, but his brief essay leaves out much pertinent history and, in the process, gives the impression that separation of church and state is largely the result of accident, coincidence, or conspiracy. Hardly.
Madison, who had a central role in drafting the Constitution and the First Amendment, confirmed that he understood them to “[s]trongly guard[] . . . the separation between Religion and Government.” Madison, Detached Memoranda (~1820). He made plain, too, that they guarded against more than just laws creating state sponsored churches or imposing a state religion. Mindful that even as new principles are proclaimed, old habits die hard and citizens and politicians could tend to entangle government and religion (e.g., “the appointment of chaplains to the two houses of Congress” and “for the army and navy” and “[r]eligious proclamations by the Executive recommending thanksgivings and fasts”), he considered the question whether these actions were “consistent with the Constitution, and with the pure principle of religious freedom” and responded: “In strictness the answer on both points must be in the negative. The Constitution of the United States forbids everything like an establishment of a national religion.”
During his presidency, Madison also vetoed two bills, neither of which would form a national religion or compel observance of any religion, on the ground that they were contrary to the establishment clause. While some in Congress expressed surprise that the Constitution prohibited Congress from incorporating a church in the town of Alexandria in the District of Columbia or granting land to a church in the Mississippi Territory, Congress upheld both vetoes. He pocket vetoed a third bill that would have exempted from import duties plates to print Bibles. Separation of church and state is not a recent invention of the…
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