"cpt banjo" <cptbanjo@aol.com> wrote:
:|Actually, the metaphor of a wall of separation between church and state
:|goes back to Roger Williams.
it's totally irrelevant since Jefferson's phrase isn't the law. Jefferson
didn't create separation of church and state in either Virginia or on the
national level.
The man who did far more than Jefferson in that area was Madison.
There is no evidence that Jefferson ever read anything Roger Williams ever
wrote.
Jefferson got his idea from another source
Daniel L. Dreisbach discloses some Background on the probable origins of
Jefferson's "Wall of Separation" phrase:
James Burgh (1714-1775)
A radical Whig Commonwealth man who was "one of Britain's foremost
spokesman for political reform" whose writings influenced political thought
in revolutionary America.(80)
Burgh brought to his writings a dissenter's zeal for religious
toleration and a distrust of established churches. Indeed, his antipathy
toward ecclesiastical establishments was a logical extension of his staunch
defense of religious toleration.(89) Burgh thought religion was a matter
between God and one's conscience; and he contended that two citizens with
different religious views are "both equally fit for being employed, in the
service of our country." (90) He alerted his audience to the potential
crippling influences of established churches. Danger existed, he warned, in
"a church's getting too much power into her hands, and turning religion
into a mere state-engine."(91) Therefore, in his work Crito (1766, 1767),
Burgh proposed building "an impenetrable wall of separation between things
sacred and civil."(92) He dismissed the conventional argument that the
public administration of the church was necessary to preserve its salutary
influence in society.
"I will fairly tell you what will be the consequences of your setting
up such a mixed-mungrel-spiritual-temporal-secular-ecclesiastical
establishment. You will make the dispensers of religion despicable and
odious to all men of sense, and will destroy the spirituality, in which
consists the: whole value, of religion. . . .
Shew yourselves superior to all these follies and knaveries. Put into
the hands of the people the clerical emoluments; and let them give them to
whom they will; choosing their public teachers, and maintaining them
decently, but moderately, as becomes their spiritual character. We have in
our times a proof from the conduct of some among us, in respect of the
appointment of their public administrators of religion, that such a scheme
will answer all the necessary purposes, and prevent infinite
corruption;--ecclesiastical corruption; the most odious of all corruption.
Build an impenetrable wall of separation between things sacred and
civil. Do not send a graceless officer, reeking from the ***** of his trull,
to the performance of a holy rite of religion, as a test for his holding
the command of a regiment. To profane, in such a manner, a religion, which
you pretend to reverence, is an impiety sufficient to bring down upon your
heads, the roof of the sacred building you thus defile."(93) Burgh
concluded that entanglements between religion and the civil state lead to
the very corruption that establishmentarians argued was countered by an
ecclesiastical establishment.
Jefferson admired and recommended Burgh's writings. In 1790 he advised
Thomas Mann Randolph, his future son-in-law, that a young man preparing for
a legal career should read, among other works, Smith's Wealth of Nations,
Montesquieu's Spirit of Laws (with reservations), Locke's "little book on
Government," the Federalist, Burgh's Political Disquisitions, and Hume's
Political Essays.(94) In 1803, while President, he even "urged" one of
Burgh's books on Congress."(95) Given his enthusiasm for Burgh's work, it
is plausible that Jefferson's construction of the First Amendment was
influenced by Burgh's recommendation for "an impenetrable wall of
separation." Jefferson was not the only AAmericanin the founding era who
admired Burgh's writings. John Adams wrote that he had "contributed
somewhat to make [Political] Disquisitions more known and attended to in
several parts of America," and reported that the work was "held in as high
estimation by all my friends as they are by me." (96) The Philadelphia
publishers of Political Disquisitions (who "published [the treatise in
America] on a subscription basis within sixteen months of the English"
edition (97) listed over one hundred prominent American "encouragers" or
subscribers, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Chase,
John Dickinson, John Hancock, Robert Morris, Benjamin Rush, Roger Sherman,
and James Wilson." Oscar and Mary Handlin, the first Twentieth-century
authors to "rediscover" Burgh, opined that the Scotsman "was as close to
American thought as any European of his time."(99)
For various reasons, Burgh's considerable influence on the founding
generation has been relegated to a historical footnote.(100) If, in fact,
Jefferson appropriated Burgh's figure of speech in the Danbury letter, the
Scotsman's most enduring impact on American political thought may well be
the "wall" metaphor." Interestingly, Burgh dedicated the second volume of
Crito "To The Good People of BRITAIN of THE TWENTIETH CENTURY," Because he
expected the "Twentieth-Century, gentlemen and ladies to be of a more
composed way of thinking than my contemporaries."(102) It was only in the
last of the twentieth century, since Everson v. Board of Education (1847),
that the "wall" metaphor emerged as a popular symbol of church-state
relations in the United States. Burgh was perhaps correct to believe that
only a "twentieth-century" audience would appreciate his ideas. In the
Danbury letter, Jefferson, like Burgh, seems to have looked forward to a
day when there would be wide acceptance of his understanding of the rights
of conscience.(103)
Footnotes:
(80). Carla H. Hay, James Burgh, Spokesman for Reform in Hanoverian,
England (Washington, D.O.: University Press of America, 1879), 30, 41-44.
Hay argued that Burgh's "tome (Political Disquisitions) quickly secured the
status in England and in America of a monumental reference work with the
authority of a political classic. An impressive number of America's
founding fathers and virtually all the key figures in the English reform
movement were indebted to the work." Ibid. 105
(89). Hay, James Burgh, 51. The Real Whigs were early and zealous
advocates of religious liberty. Mayer, "The English Radical Whig Origins."
163. For a useful discussion of religious dissenters in England during this
era, see Anthony Lincoln, Some Political and Social Ideas of English
Dissent, 1763-1800 (Cambridge, England. Cambridge University Press,
1938).
(90). [James Burgh], Crito, or Essays on Various Subjects, 2 vols.
(London, 1766. 1767), II: 68, as quoted in Kramnick, Republicanism and
Bourgeois Radicalism, , 232.
(91). Crito, I: 7.
(9). Crito, I1: 119
(93). Crito, 11: 117-19.
(94). Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Mann Randolph, 30 May
1790, in Life and Selected Writings of Jefferson, 496-97. Nearly a quarter
of a century later, Jefferson gave the same advice to Bernard Moore, see
letter from Thomas Jefferson to Bernard Moore. 30 August 1814, in Randall,
The Life of Thomas Jefferson, 1. 55.
(95). H. Trevor Colbourn, "Thomas Jefferson's Use of the Past," William
and Mary Quarterly July 15 (3rd series, 1958): 65 n. 47; Hay, James Burgh,
43.
(96). Letter from John Adams to James Burgh, 28 December 1774, in The
Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States, ed. Charles
Francis Adams (Boston, Mass.,Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1851), IX:
351. See also [Adams], "Novanglus," in
Works of Adams, IV: 21 n. '
(97). Hay, James Burgh, 42. See generally H. Trevor Colbourn. The lamp
of Experience. Whig History and the Intellectual Origins of the American
Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press;
Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1065).
(98). James Burgh, political Disquisitions: or, An Enquiry into public
Errors, Defects, and Abuses 3 vols. (Philadelphia Pa., 1775), 111: "Names
of the Encouragers."
(99). Oscar and Mary Handlin, "James Burgh," 57.
(100). Oscar and Mary Handlin suggested that Burgh's influence faded
because he was "an unsystematic thinker, was more of a transmitter and
popularizer of ideas than a truly original theorist, and was clearly not of
the same intellectual stature of Hume, Locke, or Montesquieu. Oscar and
Mary Handlin. "James Burgh," 38-39, 55-57.
(101). Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore identified Burgh as "the
original source of the metaphor, which Jefferson would use, that captures
in a phrase this entire liberal secular view of the relationship between
politics and religion--the wall of separation" Kramnick and Moore, The
Godless Constitution: The Case Against Religious Correctness (New York:
W.W. Norton, 1996), 82. See also Kramnick, Republicanism and Bourgeois
Radicalism, 232 (Burgh "could well he the source of Jefferson's" metaphor).
(102). Crito. II: dedication, 1, 3. See also Hay, James Burgh, 34;
Kramnick, Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism, 228.
(103). See Joseph F. Costanzo, "Thomas Jefferson, Religious Education
and Public Law," Journal of Public Law 8 ( 1959): 98 ("Years before all the
states cancelled their church establishments and decades before the Supreme
Court would make the First Amendment meaning Of religious liberty operative
upon the states through the Fourteenth Amendment, Jefferson is looking
forward to the day when state governments would follow the example of the
federal Constitution and guarantee by law equality of religious freedom.").
Source of Information: "Sowing Useful Truths and principles: The Danbury
Baptists, Thomas Jefferson and the 'Wall of Separation'", By Daniel L.
Dreisbach, Journal Of Church and State, Volume 39, Summer 1997, Number 3,
pp 486-490 [Published four times a year by the J. M. Dawson Institute of
Church-State Studies of Baylor University.]
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Posting and reading from alt.politics.usa.constitution OR alt.education
You are invited to check out the following:
The Rise of the Theocratic States of America
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American Theocrats - Past and Present
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The Constitutional Principle: Separation of Church and State
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[and to join the discussion group for the above site and/or Separation of
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.. . . You can't understand a phrase such as "Congress shall make no law
respecting an establishment of religion" by syllogistic reasoning. Words
take their meaning from social as well as textual contexts, which is why "a
page of history is worth a volume of logic." New York Trust Co. v. Eisner,
256 U.S. 345, 349, 41 S.Ct. 506, 507, 65 L.Ed. 963 (1921) (Holmes, J.).
Sherman v. Community Consol. Dist. 21, 980 F.2d 437, 445 (7th Cir. 1992)
.. . .
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THE CONSTITUTIONAL PRINCIPLE:
SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE
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