When Jefferson replied to the Danbury Baptist’s Association letter asking for his support against having freedom of religion guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, he very clearly explained what he meant when he said that phrase, “…a wall of separation between Church and State.”
The Baptist Association, like Jefferson, were Federalists, and as such wanted an absolute minimum function of the federal government. Jefferson himself said that the only things the federal government should provide are for a national defense, diplomatic relations, and deliver the mail, nothing else. The Danbury Baptists didn’t want freedom of religion/freedom to worship guaranteed in the Bill of Rights because those are freedoms granted by men, and their fear was that if certain men were to gain power who had no respect for religion, those men could take away those rights originally granted by the first men.
Look around you today. They were exactly right!
What they wanted was for this right to be expressed as one of the inalienable rights that don’t come from man, and that would help insure that man could never legislate it out of existence.
But Jefferson, responding in that time and circumstance, looked around him at the men who were our nation’s Founding Fathers and saw a group of men who freely practiced their religion - IN public - and it was that these men would never stand for such an idiotic notion that you had to hide your religious beliefs behind the door of a church that made Jefferson say that the feelings of those men acted as a wall of separation between Church and State. Not that there ]ishould be a wall, keeping the church out of the state, but that their WAS a wall keeping the state out of the church.
One of the previous posts alluded to the idea that it was improper for the government to give money to anything tied to religion. Well that’s not what these men who founded our nation did, in fact they did the exact opposite. They paid chaplains to offer prayers daily in both houses of congress. Presidents paid ministers and gave them space IN government facilities to conduct worship services. Several of the signers of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were quite open about their religious beliefs.
William Samuel Johnson, one of the signers of the Constitution and a leading scholar of his day (he was later the first President of Columbia College) spoke at public school graduations. At one of them he said:
“You this day, gentlemen, have received a public education, the purpose whereof has been to qualify you better to serve your Creator and your country.”
Later in his remarks he said:
“Your first great duties, if you are sensible, are those you owe to heaven, to your Creator, and to your redeemer. Let these be ever present to your mind, and be exemplified in your life and your conduct.”
The next 20 minutes of his remarks are full of biblical verse after biblical verse. At a PUBLIC school graduation. Ahhhh, what did he know, he was only there for all the debates and actually signed the Constitution!
Meanwhile, in 2009, a Valedictorian was not allowed to give her speech out of fear that she might utter the G-word.
If you look at a replica of the actual US Constitution, the handwriting you are looking at belongs to Mr. Gouvenor Morris, the man who actually put pen to paper and wrote it. Morris was the most active participant in the deliberations leading up to the document. You ever hear in school what a man with those kind of credential had to say about the idea of church and state being separate?
Well he wrote two books about his experiences in the Constitutional Convention. In both books he says, speaking about the PUBLIC school system (which was already 150 years old at the time):
“Religion is the only solid basis of good morals. Therefore, education should teach the precepts of religion and the duties of man toward God.”
Instead of listening to a guy like that, a guy who was right there and was knee deep in the whole process and KNEW what the intent of the men in that room was, we have decided to make Thomas Jefferson the “expert” on the 1st Amendment. People in Jefferson’s day did ask him to comment on the Bill of Rights and Jefferson told them (I’m summarizing not quoting), ‘Why are you asking me about the Bill of Rights? I was in France when it was deliberated. I didn’t even see it until after it was ratified. Why don’t you go ask the men who were involved?’ Even Jefferson did not identify himself as any kind of authority on the 1st Amendment, but in court cases since 1952 he has been cited more than any other Founding Father in 1st Amendment cases.
In the mid 1800s, a secularist group presented a petition to both houses of Congress with the intent to totally secularize government. Now this was only about 60 years after the Bill of Rights, that same amount of time from them as WWII is from us today. Both houses referred it to committee and about a year later both committees reported back. If you want a good and quick education on what our Founding Fathers thought about religion and government, go find and read those committee reports. If you can’t find it, let me know and I’ll post at least the most important paragraphs of them for you to read. It is 180 degrees from what our lawmakers today believe.
