On
Religious Liberty
“Wall Of Separation"
Another
well known, but recently controverted, principle that has guided
the constitutional decisions of the US Supreme Court is Thomas
Jefferson’s concept of a “wall of separation between church and
state.”
While
serving as President, Jefferson wrote his famous letter to the
Danbury Baptists’ Association, seeing it as an opportunity to
express his views on the meaning of the First Amendment
Establishment Clause.
On
January 1, 1802, only a decade after the First Amendment was
adopted, Jefferson brought the phrase into public circulation in
a reply to an address of the Danbury Baptists Association.
Jefferson wrote:
"Believing with you
that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his
God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his
worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions
only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence
that act of the whole American people which declared that their
legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of
religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus
building a wall of separation between church and state."
Some try to argue that
the absence of this phrase from the Constitution should cause it
to be banished as a constitutional metaphor. But this reasoning
is misleading. Leo Pfeffer cogently notes that:
“It is true that the
phrase ‘separation of church and state’ does not appear in the
Constitution. But it was inevitable that some convenient term
should come into existence to verbalize a principle so clearly
and widely held by the American people. For example, the phrase
‘Bill of Rights’ has become a convenient term to designate the
freedoms guaranteed in the first ten amendments; yet it would be
the height of captiousness to argue that the phrase does not
appear in the Constitution. Similarly, the right to a fair
trial is generally accepted to be a constitution principle; yet
the term ‘fair trial’ is not found in the Constitution. The
phrase ‘interstate commerce,’…does not appear in the
Constitution—neither does the phrase ‘self-incrimination,’ or
‘right of privacy,’ or ‘freedom of association.’…The universal
acceptance which all these terms, including ‘separation of
church and state,’ have received in America would seem to
confirm rather than disparage their reality as basic American
democratic principles.”
Thomas
Jefferson
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