Jefferson Didn’t Want to Split Church, State

In debating the proper role of religion in our society, secularists typically rely on eight words Thomas Jefferson penned in 1802: “a wall of separation between church and state.”

They should reconsider. It turns out this phrase, which comes from Jefferson’s “Letter to the Danbury Baptists,” did not mean to Jefferson what it does to the folks over at the American Civil Liberties Union. An exhibit opening Tuesday at the Huntington Library reveals the discrepancy between history and ideologues’ use of it.

The exhibit, “Religion and the Founding of the American Republic,” shows that the founders meant not to push religion out of political and civic life but to achieve something a lot more complex: to tame religious passions, thus quelling sectarian conflicts the colonists brought with them from Europe, while also freeing the individual conscience and promoting habits of decency so self-government could succeed.

This exhibit, traveling from the Library of Congress in Washington and organized by its chief of manuscripts, James H. Hutson, features a facsimile of the Jefferson letter. The plain cursive writing, on a page crowded with revisions, allows us to consider the balance and nuance in Jefferson’s missive to a Baptist group in Connecticut that had published an open letter to him.

The famous phrase was not offered as a complete or exhaustive articulation of the religion clause of the Constitution’s 1st Amendment. As visitors to the exhibit will learn, the letter’s purpose was specific: to reassure a religious minority that individual conscience would be respected under the Jefferson administration. The newly elected president wanted the Danbury Baptists to know that the federal government would not force citizens to worship God in a certain way, and that to prove it, he would discontinue a practice that presidents Washington and Adams had of proclaiming days of religious fasting and thanksgiving.

The Library of Congress (with help from the FBI lab) has digitally recovered what is underneath Jefferson’s cross-outs on this letter. Two interesting things emerge. He eliminated his explanation of why he would discontinue federal religious proclamations. His margin notes say the explanation might have seemed disrespectful to others who would read the document, namely those religious believers who set great store by such proclamations. And he altered his now-famous metaphor. He originally styled it “a wall of eternal separation between church and state.” But he deleted the word “eternal,” making the phrase less categorical.

The implication, the exhibit notes say, is that “Jefferson must have been unhappy with the uncompromising tone of both these phrases, especially in view of his decision, two days later, to begin attending church services in the House of Representatives.”

Jefferson’s successor, President Madison, also went to church services in the House chamber. A surprising fact because we are taught that the framers--especially James Madison and Jefferson--meant for religion and government to be “maintained as separate spheres,” as a noted secularist put it recently. As the exhibit makes clear, they were deliberately offering, with their worship on government property, symbolic support of religion as a prop for republican government.

To be sure, the founders knew religious fervor could lead to extremism, even violence. Wars of religion were the bane of Europe. But the remedy that was settled on was religious pluralism, not a French Revolution-style purge of religion from civic life.

Jefferson and Madison were pro-pluralism for good reason: They were Virginians. Virginia had a state church, Episcopalianism. The Virginia Episcopalians amassed great power and wealth, impelling these two eloquent spokesmen for liberty to take a stand. Jefferson’s 1777 Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom and Madison’s 1785 Memorial and Remonstrance helped win the campaign to separate church and state in Virginia.

So the goal was to break up a denominational monopoly, not to vacuum the public realm clean of expressions of faith.

That religiosity renders people unable to deliberate rationally upon civic matters is a core contention of the strict separationists. When we consult the actual words and deeds of the founders, we see they did not believe this at all. They did not erect an impermeable wall between faith and reason--or between church and state. They sought a delicate balance: to simultaneously dampen zealotry and encourage the moral sense of individuals.