Joseph Loconte
Published 1/6/2002
One Sunday morning during Thomas Jefferson's presidency, a friend stopped him on his way to Christ Church, then meeting on Capitol Hill. The president had a prayer book tucked under his arm. The man was incredulous. "You do not believe a word in it," he said.
Jefferson, pilloried as the village atheist
during his first presidential campaign, was unruffled. "Sir," he replied,
"no nation has ever yet existed or been governed without religion. Nor can be."
He explained that, as that nation's chief executive, he was obliged to give religion its
public due.
The story is worth recalling as we mark the 200th
anniversary of Jefferson's famous statement on religion and politics — that the First
Amendment built "a wall of separation between church and state." Many will
celebrate the wall metaphor as the defining feature of America's secular republic. But
recent scholarship into its background may temper the festivities.
The expression is found nowhere in the Constitution,
appearing instead in a letter to Connecticut Baptists dated Jan. 1, 1802. It was largely
unheard of, in fact, until the Supreme Court invoked it in a 1947 case concerning
government aid to parochial schools. Courts now cite the phrase to deny any form of public
support for religion, while liberals quote it as holy writ.
Conservatives, meanwhile, dismiss the letter as marginal to the religious temper of
the Founders.
Historians are casting fresh doubts on each of these views.
In a forthcoming book, "Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation," American
University Professor Daniel Dreisbach argues that the letter's meaning cannot be
understood apart from the politics of the time. A culture war was raging:
Jefferson's Republicans, jealously protective of the
separation of powers, accused the Federalists of secretly being monarchists, keen to
exploit religion for partisan purposes.
Jefferson meant to counter the smear campaign against him
and his Republican principles. But he also intended to soothe his allies. "It was a
political statement," Mr. Dreisbach writes, "carefully crafted to reassure
Jefferson's Baptist constituents in New England of his continuing commitment to their
religious rights." In much of Colonial America, where Congregationalism or
Anglicanism enjoyed tax support as state churches, Baptists struggled as a beleaguered
minority.
Their resentment fueled the political quest for religious
liberty. Jefferson agreed with these dissenters — as did virtually all the Founders
— that when government coerces conscience in matters of faith it threatens both civic
peace and the purity of religion. That's why he begins the letter by insisting that
"religion is a matter which lies solely between Man and his God." It was the
same argument he used 17 years earlier in a "Bill for Establishing Religious
Freedom" in his native Virginia — a landmark victory made possible by massive
evangelical support.
Here was a view of the sanctity of conscience held as
tenaciously by Baptist preacher John Leland as it was by Enlightenment leader John Locke.
Jefferson's wall, Mr. Dreisbach concludes, was not meant to
bar religion from public life but to prevent faith from being either politicized or tread
upon by government.
James Hutson, manuscript curator for the Library of
Congress, agrees. He says Jefferson placed great value on symbolic support to religion.
Two days after writing the letter, the president attended church services in the House of
Representatives, a practice he would continue for years. He opened up federal buildings
— including the Treasury, the War Office and the Supreme Court — to a variety of
religious services. "It is no exaggeration to say that, on Sundays in Washington
during Thomas Jefferson's presidency, the state became the church," Mr. Hutson says.
Jefferson was no closet Christian, nor did he approve of
federal subsidies for churches. He notoriously declined to proclaim national days of
thanksgiving. But government at all levels could accommodate religious expression —
even worship services — so long as it was voluntary and the state didn't pick
favorites. Jefferson saw no conflict between the First Amendment and the availability of
public property, public facilities and even government personnel to religious bodies.
The reason went beyond mere politics. When Jefferson
remarked that no nation could be governed without religion, he did not have in mind the
corrupted variety of government churches. In this, he argued exactly as the most pious
Founders did: Religious belief — freely chosen and given wide public space —
nurtured morality and thus supported a free society.
That ought to make both the theocrats and the secularists
uneasy. For Jefferson's wall between church and state was meant to serve a greater goal
— to promote and preserve religious liberty for Americans of all faiths.
Joseph Loconte is the William E. Simon fellow in religion and a free society at the Heritage Foundation and a commentator for National Public Radio.
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