Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation Between Church and State

Notes

Notes Notes to Chapter 1 1. Reynolds v. United States, 98 U.S. 145, 164 (1879). 2. Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U.S. 1, 16, 18 (1947). 3. Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Messrs. Nehemiah Dodge, Ephraim Robbins, and Stephen S. Nelson, a committee of the Danbury Baptist association in the state of Connecticut, 1 January 1802, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Manuscript Division, Library of Congress), Series 1, Box 89, December 2, 1801–January 1, 1802; Presidential Papers Microfilm, Thomas Jefferson Papers (Manuscript Division, Library of Congress), Series 1, Reel 25, November 15, 1801–March 31, 1802. 4. Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Levi Lincoln, 1 January 1802, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Manuscript Division, Library of Congress), Series 1, Box 89, December 2, 1801–January 1, 1802; Presidential Papers Microfilm, Thomas Jefferson Papers (Manuscript Division, Library of Congress), Series 1, Reel 25, November 15, 1801–March 31, 1802. 5. U.S. Constitution, amendment 1. 6. See Amos v. Corporation of the Presiding Bishop of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, 594 F. Supp. 791, 811 (1984), quoting Senator Samuel Ervin (“[T]he first amendment was a design to raise a wall of separation between church and state and was designed to keep the state’s hands off the church and the church’s hands off the state.”). This passage is a slight paraphrase of Justice Robert H. Jackson’s dictum in Everson, 330 U.S. at 26–27 (Jackson, J., dissenting) (Religious freedom “was set forth [in the Constitution] in absolute terms, and its strength is its rigidity. It was intended not only to keep the states’ hands out of religion, but to keep religion’s hands off the state.”). See also id. at 16 (“Neither a state nor the Federal Government can, openly or secretly , participate in the affairs of any religious organizations or groups and vice versa.”). 7. Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602, 612 (1971). 8. Robert S. Alley, So Help Me God: Religion and the Presidency, Wilson to Nixon (Richmond, Va.: John Knox Press, 1972), 145. 155 9. R. Freeman Butts, The American Tradition in Religion and Education (Boston: Beacon Press, 1950), 93. 10. See Edwin S. Gaustad, “Religion,” in Thomas Jefferson: A Reference Biography , ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1986), 282 (remarking that “[t]his powerful metaphor, once employed, became even more familiar to the American public than did the constitutional language itself ”); Philip Hamburger, Separation of Church and State (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 1 (“Two centuries later, Jefferson’s phrase, ‘separation between church and state,’ provides the label with which vast numbers of Americans refer to their religious freedom. In the minds of many, his words have even displaced those of the U.S. Constitution, which, by contrast, seem neither so apt nor so clear.”); Barbara A. Perry, “Justice Hugo Black and the ‘Wall of Separation between Church and State,’” Journal of Church and State 31 (1989): 55 (“The phrase, coined by Thomas Jefferson as an interpretive metaphor for the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, undoubtedly is more familiar to the general public than the Amendment’s actual language.”); Note, “Sharpening the Prongs of the Establishment Clause: Applying Stricter Scrutiny to Majority Religions,” Georgia Law Review 23 (1989): 1093 (“Thomas Jefferson is often identified with a metaphor probably more widely known than the text of the first amendment itself: the ‘wall of separation’ between church and state.”). 11. Leonard W. Levy, The Establishment Clause: Religion and the First Amendment, 2d ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 250. 12. Harold D. Hammett, “The Homogenized Wall,” American Bar Association Journal 53 (October 1967): 929; Hammett, “Separation of Church and State: By One Wall or Two?” Journal of Church and State 7 (1965): 190. See also Conrad Henry Moehlman, The Wall of Separation between Church and State: An Historical Study of Recent Criticism of the Religious Clause of the First Amendment (Boston: Beacon Press, 1951), 57 (“Today Jefferson’s significant figure of speech is the popularly and judicially accepted summary of the religious clause of the First Amendment.”); Derek H. Davis, “What Jefferson’s Metaphor Really Means,” Liberty, January/February 1997, 12 (“his letter has become a pillar of American public policy regarding the relationship between church and state”). 13. Reynolds v. United States, 98 U.S. 145, 164 (1879). 14. Everson, 330 U.S. at 15–16, 18. 15. McCollum v. Board of...