Editor’s Note: The following is part two in a four-part series on religious liberty. To see the previous installment, click here.
Some may see a contradiction between the actions of the founders in creating Thanksgiving and Thomas Jefferson’s famous claim that the religion clauses of the first amendment create “a wall of separation between church and state.”
However, a general mandate for “separation between church and state” has no basis from a straight reading of the text of the establishment clause, whose purview only extends to prohibiting Congress from making a specific type of law.
In fact, it sounds like Jefferson was saying that it is the prohibition on Congress which constitutes “a” wall, not necessarily a wide wall or an absolute wall, just “a” wall of separation between church and state. In other words, Jefferson was describing the prohibition on Congress rather than claiming that that prohibition extends beyond congress or demanding that anyone separate Church and State in any kind of general way.
Moreover, Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists (in which he coined the phrase “a wall of separation between church and state”) was itself official correspondence on behalf of the government, which is significant because he ends the letter with “kind prayers for the protection & blessing of the common father and creator of man.” So, using Jefferson’s standard, government correspondence, even to private individuals and groups, can freely include assertions of God. If the government wants to, it can use public stationary and postage to send every American a Thanksgiving card expressing “kind prayers for the protection and blessing of the common father and creator of man.”
Now, you might say, maybe Jefferson’s letter wasn’t official correspondence on behalf of the government. But then in that case it would have no place being used as the official standard for interpreting the establishment clause.
Did Jefferson not understand his own idea of “separation between Church and State” or is it more likely that government acknowledgment of God does not violate the separation between Church and State?
We may find the definitive answer to that question in the reason why the U.S. Supreme Court chose to defer to Thomas Jefferson as the authority on the Establishment Clause. The Court deferred to Jefferson because Jefferson wrote the law upon which Congress based the Establishment Clause, the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom.
However, that very law acknowledges God and does so explicitly. In other words, the law written by Thomas Jefferson makes the claim that God exists. Jefferson’s statement is authoritative to the Court because he is the author of a law that acknowledges God. If that law which says God exists is not valid, then “separation between church and state” is not authoritative. We cannot therefore say that “separation between church and state” prohibits government from acknowledging God, as that would mean that “separation
between church and state” prohibits the very law whose validity is necessary in order for “separation between church and state” to be authoritative.
The statute in question, which served as the basis for the religion clauses of the First Amendment, begins:
Whereas Almighty God hath created the mind free; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burthens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the Holy author of our religion, who being Lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as it was in his Almighty power to do…
Yes, the very man who the U.S. Supreme Court cited as the authority on the meaning of the Establishment Clause, put the explicit acknowledgment of God into the law.
Thanks to Thomas Jefferson, the government not only acknowledges God but sets forth certain doctrines: that God is Almighty, that God created the mind free, that God has a Holy plan, is Lord both of body and mind, etc. And all of these things are necessarily valid if “separation” is authoritative.
As mentioned earlier, the Establishment Clause itself only limits congress. The Clause does not however say that congress, let alone any other branch or representative of government, cannot officially acknowledge God or make laws acknowledging God. God is Himself not an “establishment of religion.”
David HallMarch 18, 2015
This article helps to clarify this misunderstanding about what Jefferson meant when he wrote about a wall of separation between church and state. He did not mean the separation of RELIGION and state, but of CHURCH and state. There's a difference. Jefferson, who believed in God but was not fond of organized religion, was very cognizant of this difference. Modern secularists blur this distinction for their own purposes. The Bible is not Church, it is Religion. The Ten Commandments are religion. Prayer is religion. Mass, priests, creeds, donations, etc. are church. What the founders wanted was not to take away the influence of God from our government, but the influence of churches.
mosslbMarch 18, 2015
In Jefferson's day the Church of England ministers were paid by all residents of the state. Quakers, who did not pay tax had their crops and stock removed from their farms. The Church's vestry books show their control of other duties which should have been done by the state, such as processioning, which was inspection of property boundaries to update their descriptions for continued accuracy (in those days boundaries were described with trees, rocks, creeks and rivers). Jefferson was correct in separating church and state, but it had nothing to do with today's push to eliminated the church from the state and country.