David Shelley FACT’s Director of Church and Community Relations

December 29, 2009

The Origin of the ‘Separation of Church and State’

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution plainly forbids the creation of a national church because that would be an “establishment of religion.” However, the Constitution says nothing about the so-called “separation of church and state” that is referred to so often in the public discourse today. The phrase “separation of church and state” simply does not exist in any our nation’s founding documents: the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution (including the Bill of Rights). It is a phrase used by Thomas Jefferson in a personal letter that he wrote to some pastors from the Danbury (CT) Baptist Association of Churches in 1802.

In the early 1800’s, many of the original states had churches sanctioned by state governments. These were “established churches,” but because they were state matters, they were not forbidden in the U.S. Constitution. The First Amendment only prohibited the U. S. Congress from establishing a federal religion; it said nothing to the states. 1 Mostly, the state churches were Anglican, Congregational or Presbyterian. This was so due to the will of the majority as each state church was created through its elected representatives. The only state without an official church was Rhode Island.

James Madison, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a Framer of the Constitution, and the author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776), helped fashion the First Amendment. To address the concerns that the Bill of Rights might hinder the continuance of state churches, Madison explained that: “The civil rights of none shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national religion be established, nor shall the full and equal rights of conscience be in any manner, or on any pretest, abridged.”

The Christian religion, in some form or fashion, was held by all of the signers of the Declaration of Independence and the Framers of the Constitution. Their own writings prove this, and author David Barton has shown that even the two “least Christian” of these men, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, were far more religious than what we would describe today as the “Religious Right.” 2

John Quincy Adams, the sixth president of the U.S., said:

Our political way of life is by the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God, and of course presupposes the existence of God, the moral ruler of the universe, and a rule of right and wrong, of just and unjust, binding upon man, preceding all institutions of human society and government. 3

The early American culture was almost exclusively Christian (this is surmised from the literary publications of the period), and all of the early American presidents made public declarations to their faith in Christ. Most of the federal buildings and monuments in Washington, D.C., have religious statements and biblical passages inscribed in stone, our Congress is led each day in prayer, our Supreme Court begins each session with the statement, “God save this honorable court,” and our religious freedoms are the envy of the world.

How Times Have Changed

In the early 21st century, the biblical bedrock of American government is crumbling due to a pervasive lie that the Constitution requires the church (the body of Christ) to stay out of matters of the state. This doctrine has given some church leaders a rationale to be silent on cultural and political issues, and the nation is morally ignorant because of it. Only one-third of U.S. adults consider themselves to be “mostly conservative” on social and political matters, and about half as many (17 percent) say they are “mostly liberal” on such matters. 4 This means that the majority of American adults have no real preferences on social and political matters. Is it any wonder that we are suffering in so many areas of society? Upwards of 50 million babies have died in America through legalized abortion, and most Christian people either do not know about this infanticide or do not really care. The Old Testament prophet Hosea lamented: “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge” (Hosea 4:6). 5

Many Americans today assume that the words “separation of church and state” are written in the Constitution, even though they are not, because millions of Americans are historically uninformed. Thomas Jefferson usually gets the blame for introducing the separation doctrine, but actually it was Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black that moved the separation phrase into common jurisprudence in the 1947 decision, Everson v. Board of Education.

As a publicly acknowledged Klansman, Justice Black surely must have agreed with the Klan’s oath of allegiance, to “most zealously ... shield and preserve ... (the) separation of church and state.” 6 Alan Sears, of the Alliance Defense Fund, says, “Klan doctrine is not a good way to interpret the U.S. Constitution.” 7 Since then, the “political correctness” movement has preached that the separation of church and state means that Americans should erase all references to God from this nation. Such nonsense was clearly never the Founders’ position, but it has become the position of millions of Americans today.

In 1952, U. S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas wrote:

We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being. We guarantee the freedom to worship as one chooses. We make room for as wide a variety of beliefs and creeds as the spiritual needs of man deem necessary. We sponsor an attitude on the part of government that shows no partiality to any one group, and that lets each flourish according to the zeal of its adherents and the appeal of its dogma ...

To hold that government may not encourage religious instruction would be to find in the Constitution a requirement that the government show a callous indifference to religious groups. That would be preferring those who believe in no religion over those who do believe ... We find no constitutional requirement which makes it necessary for government to be hostile to religion and to throw its weight against efforts to widen the effective scope of religious influence (emphasis added). 8

Thank you, Justice Douglas! He was right, but his words are hardly ever heard anymore. Since the 1950’s, there has been an intentional effort to remove Christianity and religion from the realm of law and government; preferring those who have no religious beliefs over those who do in the public square.

A Quick History Lesson on Religion and the U.S. Supreme Court

From 1789 onward, the Bill of Rights applied only to the federal government. Then, in the 1925 case of Gitlow vs. New York, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment had made the free-speech and free-press guarantees of the First Amendment operative within the several states. Fifteen years later, in the 1940 decision Cantwell vs. Connecticut, the doctrine established in Gitlow was extended to apply to the religious freedom clause of the First Amendment to the states.

Empowered by these legal precedents, the first strike came in 1947, with Everson v. Board of Education, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states could not establish a religion, just as the federal government had not been able to establish a religion in the first amendment. The state of New Jersey had been paying for the transportation of students to Catholic schools, and a resident of the Ewing Township sued that this practice violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment. Although the suit was lost by the plaintiff, Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black made a statement that opened the door to using “separation of church and state” phraseology in constitutional law:

Neither a state nor the Federal Government can, openly or secretly, participate in the affairs of any religious organizations or groups and vice versa. In the words of Jefferson, the clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect “a wall of separation between Church and State.” 9

Then, in the 1962 decision, Engel v. Vitale, the Court ruled that the state of New York could not have a morning prayer in schools. The prayer in question was: “Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our country. Amen.” What an evil thing for school children to repeat every day! Participation in the prayer had always been voluntary, but the Court said that the prayer was unconstitutional (because of the “separation of church and state”).

This landmark ruling (Engel) stopped public schools from having prayer at the beginning of each school day, a practice that had been in existence since the founding of this country. Once again, Justice Black argued that there should be a separation of church and state. Engel became the basis for several subsequent decisions limiting government-directed prayer in public schools.

In Wallace v. Jaffree (1985), the Supreme Court ruled Alabama’s law permitting one minute for prayer or meditation was unconstitutional. In Lee v. Weisman (1992), the court prohibited clergy-led prayer at high school graduation ceremonies. Lee v. Weisman, in turn, was a basis for Santa Fe ISD v. Doe (2000), in which the Court extended the ban to school sanctioning of student-led prayer at high school football games.

In addition to forbidding prayer in public schools, other court cases sought to keep the Bible out of the schools’ curricula. In 1963, Abington School District v. Schempp found that the policy of beginning the public school day by reading Bible verses was unconstitutional as were the recitations of The Lord’s Prayer.

In the 1980 decision Stone v. Graham, the Supreme Court found that since there was a constitutional separation of church and state, it would be wrong for public school students to even look, even look voluntarily, at a religious document such as a posting of the Ten Commandments. The Court explained:

If the posted copies of the Ten Commandments are to have any effect at all, it will be to induce the school children to read, meditate upon, perhaps to venerate and obey the Commandments ... [T]his ... is not a permissible ... objective.

There have been many other rulings since then, but one of the most egregious came down from a federal court justice in 2000. A high school student in a New Mexico public school was elected by the popular majority of her class to be the “student council chaplain.” As such, she regularly gave prayers at the high school football games, in much the same way that thousands of chaplains and ministers have prayed for centuries at the opening of Congress and other governmental gatherings at the state and local level. A few people in the school were offended, so a lawsuit was brought against the school board. In the end, the student was informed that she could no longer pray at these events in the name of Jesus. Listen to the actual words of the judge:

The Court will allow that prayer to be a typical non-denominational prayer ... The prayer must not refer to ... Jesus ... or anyone else. ... Anybody who violates these orders, no kidding, is going to wish that he or she had died as a child when this Court gets through with it. 10

The Results of the Separation

As a result of the absence of Christian values in the government due to the separation of church and state doctrine, we now have the legalized butchering of children in the womb, same-sex marriage and adoption, tax-supported gambling through the state lottery, no-fault divorce laws that leave millions of innocent children in poor single-parent homes, television programs that parade sodomy and pornography through Americans’ living rooms in the name of “free speech,” and a pervasive fear on the part of many pastors to preach on moral and cultural topics from God’s word.

Some Good News!

It wasn’t always this bad in America, and it is possible for us to return to our moral foundations. Specifically, on the issue of “separation of church and state,” a huge victory took place in 2005 that set organizations trying to erase religion from the nation back on their heels.

In a ruling handed down on December 20, 2005, affirming as constitutional a Ten Commandments display in Mercer County, KY, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit declared, “The First Amendment does not demand a wall of separation between church and state.” The court also criticized the ACLU’s repeated reference to the construct, calling it “tiresome” and “extra-constitutional.” 11 “For years, the Alliance Defense Fund has argued against claims by the ACLU and its allies that their interpretation of the Establishment Clause is a correct interpretation. The good news for Americans is that today’s ruling says the ACLU’s interpretation is outside the Constitution. This is a dramatic rollback of the far-left’s misguided legal agenda,” said ADF Senior Counsel Gary McCaleb. Praise God that somebody can see the plain truth!

Of course, most Americans probably heard nothing about this decision, but it is now part of the legal precedent for constitutional law. A misunderstanding of American history is partially to blame for the success of the ACLU’s long tirade against religious freedom. I suppose that if you say something untrue loud enough and long enough, people will eventually begin to believe it. That is exactly what has happened in the U.S. regarding the “separation of church and state.” Groups like American Civil Liberties Union, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, Freedom from Religion Foundation, People for the American Way, and others have been reciting their untrue, unconstitutional mantra for so long and so loudly, that many, if not most, American Christians have believed the lie.

Jesus said: “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32). It is very important that Christian Americans know the truth about our religious freedoms AND that we share this truth with others. The Family Action Council of Tennessee is dedicated to this process of informing and equipping Tennesseans to be knowledgeable and to stand up for their religious freedoms. If you feel the same way, please share this information with as many people as you can. You can sign up for e-mail updates and view other information at the Web site www.FACTn.org. We also have a page for churches to obtain guidance on helping their congregations become informed.

God bless America!

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1 “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, nor prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

2 See www.wallbuilders.com.

3 John Quincy Adams, The Jubilee of the Constitution, a discourse delivered at the request of the New York Historical Society, on Tuesday, April 30, 1839, reprinted in 1986 Journal of Christian Jurisprudence. Vol.1, p. 6.

4 Data is based upon telephone interviews conducted by The Barna Group from August through early November 2008 among 3,012 adults.

5 Hosea 4:6.

6 Ku Klux Klan.

7 Alan Sears is president of Alliance Defense Fund, a religious liberty legal alliance based in Scottsdale, AZ. This statement originally appeared in an article in The Arizona Republic, August 17, 2003.

8 William Orville Douglas, Zorach v. Clauson, 343 US 306 (1952).

9 Justice Hugo Black, Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U.S. 1, 15-16.

10 Jane Doe v. Sante Fe Independent School District, Civil Action No. G-95-176 (U.S.D.C.S.D) Texas., 1995 (court transcription of verbal ruling by judge).

11 ACLU of Kentucky vs. Mercer County, 2005.