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To: H-NET/OIEAHC Electronic Association in Early American Studies <H-OIEAHC@H-NET.MSU.EDU> Delivered-to: H-OIEAHC@H-NET.MSU.EDU Original-recipient: rfc822;john.saillant@vmh.cc.wmich.edu I am astonished and dismayed by R. Jonathan Moore's brusque dismissal of the concept of the "wall of separation of church and state" in his article for History News Service. Moore's reductionist reading of Thomas Jefferson's "Danburey Baptists letter" of 1 January 1802 fails to consider the political context in which Jefferson wrote. The letter was *not* a short note of courtesy. Rather, Jefferson was writing to a beleaguered minority Protestant denomination, the Baptists, who were fighting a lonely and desperate battle against the prevailing Congregationalist majority. In Virginia, the Baptists were long key supporters of Madison and Jefferson. Thus, Jefferson was deliberately making political common cause with co-religionists of key political supporters, and was doing so in the name of the values that he enunciated in the "Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom" and that Madison enunciated in his "Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments." William C. McLoughlin's classic NEW ENGLAND DISSENT, 1630-1833 (2 vols., Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970) provides a thorough account, as does Edwin Gaustad's SWORN ON THE ALTAR OF GOD: A RELIGIOUS BIOGRAPHY OF THOMAS JEFFERSON (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1996). Moreover, Jefferson was using letters as a means of official political communication, enunciating the position of his administration on constitutional interpretation. Finally, Jefferson's own expression of religious faith was not and is not barred by even the strictest of strict-separation readings of the First Amendment. David C. Davis's THE CONTINENTAL CONGRESS AND RELIGION, 1774-1789 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000) -- soon to be reviewed for H-LAW -- carefully considers all the evidence of the Continental Congress's actions with respect to religion and reaches conclusions significantly different from those offered by Moore. Indeed, Moore overlooks that Roger Williams, the founder of the Baptist denomination, himself argued for separation of the garden of religion from the wilderness of the secular realm. See generally Mark De Wolfe Howe, THE GARDEN AND THE WILDERNESS (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965). Moore cloaks from view the contested reality of issues of church and state in the Revolutionary era, the Confederation period, and the early Republic. Two great conflicting traditions can be discerned in that era -- the tradition of strict separationism, having secular roots in the writings of such men as Jefferson and Madison and religious roots in the writings of such men as Roger Williams and Isaac Backus, and that of non-preferentialism, having roots in the writings of many New England politicians and divines. Madison's "Memorial and Remonstrance" is the most eloquent and powerful synthesis of the two separationist traditions. Yet another point that Moore fails to mention is that Madison and Jefferson also knew the bloody history of religious conflict in early modern France and England, and that they grounded their arguments for separation on the belief -- substantiated by that history -- that for religion and government to commingle is a sure recipe for social strife and factional conflict. The meaning of the First Amendment's religion clauses was contested in those periods; one key factor in understanding that amendment is the variety of perspectives -- social, political, intellectual, and religious -- that men and women of the era brought to bear on it, based on their backgrounds, religious values, and political principles. (Finally, Moore omits that the wall of separation metaphor was first invoked by the U.S. Supreme Court not in 1947 but in 1878, in REYNOLDS v. UNITED STATES, the first of the Court's polygamy decisions involving the Mormons. Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite cited that passage to justify the federal government's ban on polygamy and to deny Reynolds's free exercise claim.) ===== Richard B. Bernstein * Adjunct Professor of Law, New York Law School, 57 Worth Street, New York, NY 10013-2960 * Book Review Editor for Constitutional Books, H-LAW <http://www.h-net.msu.edu/~law/> * Senior Research Fellow and Director of Historical Research, Council on Citizenship Education, Russell Sage College <rbernstein@nyls.edu>, <richard_b_bernstein@yahoo.com> __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Send instant messages & get email alerts with Yahoo! Messenger.http://im.yahoo.com/
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