Wasn't Jefferson's Famous Wall of Separation Letter Just About Keeping Government from Interfering with Churches?
Friday Freethought Perennial for 20 September 2024
About the Friday Freethought Perennials in general: This subset of my blog is to answer questions, nearly always already answered by me and by many others but posed again and again—over many years and in many places—on freethought, atheism, secular humanism, secularism/church-state/”This is a Christian Nation,” and similar topics. These answers are mostly not intended to be original analyses, breaths of fresh air, so much as just putting a whole series of things on the record (I’d say “forever,” except I know better). One source for many of these answers is the 2012 Prometheus Books book by me and my son (Michael E. Buckner), In Freedom We Trust: An Atheist Guide to Religious Liberty. It’s available in many libraries and pretty readily in the used book after-market. I’ll cite writings of others that answer these things in more depth if I’m aware of them when I post these.
Next Friday, just FYI, will include the “rest of the story” on John Newton, the famous slave trader turned abolitionist (thanks to Christianity?)—the “wretch” who wrote the words to Amazing Grace.
Jefferson Just Wanted Government Out of the Churches’ Hair, Right? After All, No Need to Restrict Churches in a Christian Nation!
This really is a “perennial” fake question—often and thoroughly debunked, but brought back out in ways that seem clearly dishonest. For an example from just last week, see—
https://www.lifenews.com/2024/09/11/pastor-says-theres-no-perfect-candidate-so-vote-for-the-better-choice/
The recent “Religious Liberty” newsletter that linked to this article includes this dishonest “history”—
. . . in a personal letter penned by Thomas Jefferson in 1802 to the Danbury Baptist Association. . . .Jefferson wrote not that the church should stay out of government affairs, but that government affairs have no place interfering with the church.
But that is historically and provably false. Jefferson was indeed championing religious liberty, but he wrote his famous letter as President and he asked various cabinet members, including his Attorney General, Levi Lincoln, Sr., to review it before he sent it.
Thomas Jefferson (1743—1826)
Jefferson was not in any usual or orthodox way a Christian much less a Baptist (see my Letter of April 17, 2023, for more details), and he certainly did intend to declare against government interference with the church. But he had a long record of stating unambiguous opposition as well to church interference with government. Discussion of the most prominent Jefferson quotation shown on the Jefferson Memorial is sometimes distorted. The quote:
I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man
comes from a letter to his friend, Dr. Benjamin Rush, almost exactly 224 years ago, on 23 September 1800. Efforts to claim this as evidence of Jefferson’s piety (because he swears “upon the altar of God”) miss completely the context of the quote. As Frederic Clarkson noted (in Eternal Hostility, 1997, p. 6) Jefferson was complaining to Rush about “politically motivated attacks . . . from theocrats seeking to establish or re-establish their version of Christianity in the new nation.” As Clarkson wrote,
[the quotation] evokes the nature of the struggle that brought about a secular and republican form of government to the former colonies, and the fierce democratic sensibility that underlies the ethos of pluralism in the United States.
What Jefferson was swearing eternal hostility against was both government interference in individual religious choices AND church interference in government. Real religious liberty, liberty from any tyranny against the mind of man, requires both.
And that is what Jefferson was writing about in his history making letter in 1802:
To messers. Nehemiah Dodge, Ephraim Robbins, & Stephen S. Nelson, a committee of the Danbury Baptist association in the state of Connecticut.
Gentlemen
The affectionate sentiments of esteem and approbation which you are so good as to express towards me, on behalf of the Danbury Baptist association, give me the highest satisfaction. my duties dictate a faithful and zealous pursuit of the interests of my constituents, & in proportion as they are persuaded of my fidelity to those duties, the discharge of them becomes more and more pleasing.
Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & 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 & State. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.
I reciprocate your kind prayers for the protection & blessing of the common father and creator of man, and tender you for yourselves & your religious association, assurances of my high respect & esteem.
Th Jefferson
Jan. 1. 1802.
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