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In 1947, the U. S. Supreme Court decided the case of Everson v. Board of Education and thereby officially enshrined into American constitutional law the principle of separation of church and state. New Jersey had passed a law providing state-subsidized busing to all students, those who attended parochial schools as well as those who attended public ones. In his opinion for the majority, Justice Black invoked the metaphor of a "wall" of separation (used once or twice in earlier Court decisions) that Thomas Jefferson had coined in his letter to the Danbury Baptists, written in 1802. All of our contemporary debates over separation—whether they involve crèches in public places or the recent effort by the Ninth Circuit Court to remove the words "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance—trace themselves back to Everson.
Immediately after the Everson decision, The Washington Post editorialized that "the principle at issue is one of the most fundamental in the American concept of government—the separation of church and state." Philip Hamburger's book is dedicated to proving that just about every word in that editorial's sentence is incorrect.
Far from having roots in the American past, almost none of our early writers and politicians, Hamburger shows, accepted the notion of separation of church and state. When the term was used at all, it meant simply that politics and religion were different kinds of activities, not that the one should be kept entirely out of the other. Early theorists generally held that a good society required religion and its attendant morality, so that, when they used the term separation of church and state, they were not defending an ideal but launching an attack on those who denied such a self-evident truth. Nor did dissenting religions dissent from this consensus, for even if they believed in the principle, which not all of them did, they generally kept silent about it, given how unpopular the principle was.
To illustrate these points, Hamburger goes right to the heart of the matter—Jefferson's famous letter. It turns out that the Danbury Baptists were not all that happy with Jefferson's advice; they never published Jefferson's letter to them. Like other Baptists then (and to some degree now), their objections were to an establishment that, in linking itself to the political world, lost its purity of faith. Religion, as the Connecticut Baptists put it in 1803, should be "distinct" from the state because rights of conscience were given by God, not by men. This is not Jefferson's deism. It is rather an attempt to preserve religion's special mission against worldly corruption.
Separation of church and state, as Hamburger tells the story, did finally come to America during the 19th century. But it did not come as the triumph of reason; it was instead the product of Protestant nativism seeking to wage war against Catholicism. "Our sole object is to form a barrier high and eternal as the Andes, which shall forever separate the Church from the State," wrote the American Republican Party of New York in 1845.
In the very next paragraph of its declaration, however, the party went on to say that "we believe the Holy Bible, without sectarian note or comment, to be a most proper and necessary book, as well for our children as ourselves, and we are determined that they shall not be deprived of it, either in, or out of school." Implicit in this passage is that a wall should be established between government and sects rather than between government and faith. And Protestants, as they understood themselves, were not sectarian; they believed that they acted as individuals, not as corporate entities. Their entreaties about keeping government and religion distinct applied only to Catholics, not to themselves. Indeed some Protestant denominations like the Presbyterians, which had at earlier times been accused of authoritarianism, could turn around and charge Catholics with the same crime, thereby absolving themselves.
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