Modern Misconceptions on the Wall of Separation: An Analysis on the Influence and Misinterpretation of Jefferson’s Separation of Church and State (original) (raw)
Related papers
2018
This Essay argues that it’s perfectly fine for religious citizens to openly bring their faith-based values to public policy disputes. Part II demonstrates that the Founders, exemplified by Thomas Jefferson, never intended to separate religion from politics. Part III, focusing upon Abraham Lincoln’s opposition to slavery, shows that religion and politics have been continuously intermixed ever since the Founding. Part IV, emphasizing the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., argues that no other reasons justify barring faith-based arguments from the public square.
Facts and Fictions About the History of Separation of Church and State
Journal of Church and State, 2006
Responding to several new histories of church and state in America, this Article warns against the emerging view that separation of church and state is a distinctly American and relatively modern invention that has been used principally to harm religion and religious freedom. The Article traces the historical roots and routes of the principle of separation of church and state in biblical, patristic, Catholic, Protestant, and Enlightenment sources. It then shows how the eighteenth-century American founders used this principle to press five religious liberty concerns: protection of the state from the church; protection of the church from the state; protection of liberty of conscience from both church and state; protection of the new states from the federal government in their treatment of religion; and protection of citizens from unwelcome support and participation in religion. Finally, the article analyses the uses and misuses of this principle in the later history of American law.
The International Journal of Religion and Spirituality in Society, 2018
Intellectual fissures about how to best protect religious liberty in the United States are the product of a nation that has become increasingly more diverse and the Supreme Court's application of the Religious Clauses. But tensions over how to protect religious liberty were evident even at the founding of the American Republic. This is revealed in the debates within and outside of the Constitutional Convention, the thirteen state ratifying conventions, the First Federal Congress, and the creation of one of America's first public secular universities-the University of Virginia. Colonial Americans disagreed about how to best preserve religious liberty, especially whether it was better to provide protections in the federal or thirteen state constitutions. A historical examination of these debates can provide a deeper understanding of the complexity of drawing boundaries for the exercise of religious liberty. The historical record also calls into question the wisdom of the Supreme Court adopting Thomas Jefferson's "wall of separation" metaphor as its constitutional touchstone for Establishment and Free Exercise cases. Fortunately, another standard, rooted in the historical record, can be constructed-the Mutual Independence of Church and State. This standard can be used by the Supreme Court and the lower courts to better protect and promote religious liberty in postmodern America.
Reconsidering Jefferson on Race, Gender, and Religion, History Department Roundtable, Bishop's University, Sherbrooke, Qc. "Let's begin with this: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." It is a phrase I have committed to memory by virtue of my work on John F. Kennedy, who contended with longstanding religious resentments in his bid for the presidency and in his time in the White House. As I began to ponder the theme of this event—the paradoxes of Jeffersonian thought—I began to see how much these two presidents, Jefferson and JFK, had in common. Both faced tremendous religious opposition and wrestled with the religious clauses of the First Amendment, though not in perfectly symmetrical ways. [...]"
From Establishment to Freedom of Public Religion
Capital University Law Review, 2004
This Article juxtaposes the theories of religious liberty developed by Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. It argues that Jefferson’s notion of a “wall of separation between church and state” was a minority view in his day, and in the century to follow. More commonplace was Adams’ view that balanced the freedom of all peaceable private religions with the “mild and equitable establishment” of one public religion. Adam’s model of religious liberty dominated much of nineteenth-century law and culture, Jefferson’s model a good bit of twentieth-century law and culture. In its most recent cases, the U.S. Supreme Court seems to be developing a new model of religious liberty that draws on the insights of both Jefferson and Adams, but rejects their respective calls for the privatization or the establishment of religion. The Court’s formula is that both private and public forms of religion deserve constitutional freedom and support, though neither may be given preferential treatment.