A Wall to Protect, or Imprison?
By Alan Sears

Thomas Jefferson didn’t invent the ‘wall of separation.’  And he didn’t mean to lock religion out of society.  That idea came a century later from a secular Democrat from Alabama - U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black.

Like an evil genie turned loose on an innocent world, ‘the wall of separation between church and state’ is a metaphor, a figure of speech that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and its allies have summoned to suppress public expression of Christianity for decades.  It’s a legal concept that could just as easily be likened to duct tape across the mouth.

The ACLU has promoted a version of Thomas Jefferson’s famous phrase that has led public schools in some states to refuse to rent their facilities to churches on Sundays. Ten Commandments displays have been chiseled from city property.  Students have been told they can’t pray publicly at graduation ceremonies or football games or recite the Pledge of Allegiance.  Fixed-income residents in housing projects have been threatened with eviction for displaying signs about prayer in their apartment windows.

All this, because a former Ku Klux Klansman, an Alabama Democrat appointed by President Franklin Roosevelt to the Supreme Court in 1937, ripped Jefferson’s “wall of separation” phrase out of context, misinterpreted it and, in effect, rubbed the bottle.

Putting the genie back into the bottle is the goal of Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation Between Church and State, a book from New York University Press written by Daniel Dreisbach.

The book is intellectual heavy lifting, but for those willing to make the effort, pain is gain.  Dreisbach, associate professor of justice, law and society at American University, points out that Jefferson’s metaphor wasn’t his invention.  An English clergyman defending the state-supported Anglican Church used it more than 200 years earlier.  Later on, the famous colonial Separatist dissenter Roger Williams thought the phrase an artful way to keep separate the “garden of the church and the wilderness of the world.”  In other words, the phrase was coined by those seeking to protect the church’s role, not isolate it - the opposite meaning it has today.

Not until 1947 did Supreme Court Associate Justice Hugo Black give the wall metaphor the reverse spin we now see in American culture by writing in a court opinion that:  “The First Amendment has erected a wall between church and state.  That wall must be kept high and impregnable.  We could not approve the slightest breach.”

Not surprisingly, as Dreisbach points out, Black was wrong to apply the phrase to the First Amendment, which makes no mention of a wall, but instead expresses the right to “free exercise.”

The danger of Black’s reasoning, explained Dreisbach in an interview, is that it gives constitutional reasons to “separate religion, religious values, religious people, religious organizations from public life” by coercion.

The practical relevance of this?  “If we can’t talk about religion in any meaningful way in public schools, religious citizens can’t communicate their faith in public life,” Dreisbach said.  With Hugo Black’s wall, the public square “must be sanitized of religious messages, and we are left with a strictly secular public life,” he concluded.

Think for a moment.  Haven’t we seen this ‘wall’ before, fully built and garrisoned?  Doesn’t this sound suspiciously like regimes that have a distinct censorship policy and a police force organized to harass people of faith?  Sort of like, say, the Soviet Union or mainland China?

But history proves this was not what Jefferson had in mind.  As governor of Virginia, Jefferson helped the Baptists by working to stop state funding of the Anglican Church.  But as president, Jefferson knew he had no authority under the Constitution to act against religion, even the state-established church in Connecticut.

As Jefferson pointed out to the Baptists in Danbury in his famous 1802 letter, the American people prevented the national federal government from interfering in religious practice when they ratified the First Amendment, “thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.”

Jefferson’s wall allows, even encourages, the positive influences of religion in the public square, while keeping the national government at bay.  But Black’s wall is more like the prison fences built by tyrants through the ages.

Now we know that when secularists refer to Jefferson’s ‘wall,’ they’re speaking from ignorance.  In short, they are advocating Black’s wall - a wall of imprisonment and censorship, not Jefferson’s, which was a wall of protection.

Alan Sears is the President, CEO, and General Counsel of the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), the largest religious liberty legal alliance in America. For more information regarding the ADF visit their website at www.alliancedefensefund.org.