The wall between church and state

By Deacon Mike Manno

          Well Thanksgiving is over and the Christmas season is now operating at full-blast. Stores, where they still exist, will be decorated for the season, specials will be offered, and promises made that your purchase will arrive by Christmas.

          But as we ready ourselves for the Big Day we’ll also be pelted by the modern day Ebenezer Scrooges who will try to take the fun out of our celebration; or more accurately, take Christ out of Christmas.

          Public schools will (and have) banned decorations in red and green because they are Christmas colors; no wreaths on courthouse doors since they hint of a religious connotation; nativity scenes, where allowed, will need to be accompanied by a significant number of secular symbols – the three reindeer rule – in order to satisfy that “wall of separation” that Thomas Jefferson wrote about.

          So maybe it is time to discuss that “wall” – where it came from and why it exists, and most importantly, is it alive and well in today’s political jurisprudence.

          Much of it goes back to the presidential campaign of 1800 between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson’s opponents had accused him of being an atheist, and his support for the French Revolution and its animosity towards religion didn’t help that reputation. In Massachusetts and Connecticut the Congregationalist Church was legally established and supported Adams and attacked Jefferson for his religious beliefs.

          The Baptists in New England, who largely supported Jefferson, were put-off by the attacks and concerned that their existence might be questioned by the “ruling” Congregationalist. On the other side of the coin, people became concerned that a Jefferson presidency would end their religious freedoms.

           To ease their concerns a Connecticut Baptist Church from Danville wrote a letter to Jefferson in October of 1801 to flush out his views. In his reply, written January 1, 1802 Jefferson supported the Baptists desire for religious liberty. He told them that “religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God … that the legitimate power of government reach actions only, and not opinions.”

          Then referring to the Constitution’s First Amendment, he said it built a “wall of separation between church and state.” While Jefferson is credited with the “wall of separation” concept, he actually borrowed the phrase from the writings of a Puritan Clergyman Roger Williams (1603-1683) who was a champion of religious freedom after leaving the Church of England.

          Some historians now claim the Danbury letter was more of a political statement than a treatise on religious liberty. And, of course, after the smears against him in the 1800 campaign, that would seem a logical way to respond and to calm fears.

          In fact, as president, Jefferson did nothing to inhibit religion; he supported funding chaplains and Christian missionaries to the native populations. What he did not do was to proclaim religious days or weeks, such as Thanksgiving, as was done by his predecessors, Washington and Adams, and as he did as governor of Virginia. Thus indicating that in his mind there was a difference between federal and state action, perhaps an early indicator of Jefferson’s early view of federalism.

          In support of that idea remember the First Amendment prohibited congress from prohibiting the imposition of a religion or curbing the free exercise of it. Jefferson’s view is supported by the legal history of the Bill of Rights which only acted to constrain the federal government until post-Civil War times when they were gradually applied to the states.

          Later Supreme Court interpretation of the “wall” was as “high and impregnable,” suggesting that the First Amendment not only protected religious communities from governmental interference, but absurdly it also protected the government from religious interference.

          Now if you look at the First Amendment, it also protects speech, press, and assembly yet there is no suggestion that the government is protected in those matters.

          Thus the idea of a complete separation between church and state was a fallacy developed by a misinterpretation of the words used. But that didn’t stop people and groups from using the “wall” as a vehicle to prevent the visible manifestation of religious belief. And along with that came the attempt to completely secularize Christmas and all that accompanies it.

          But the courts continued misinterpreting Jefferson’s words.

          In 1879 the high court in Reynolds v. United States, called the Danbury description of the “wall” an “accepted almost as an authoritative declaration of the scope and effect of the First Amendment.” And in Everson v. Board of Education in 1947 the court held that the “wall” “must be kept high and impregnable [and] we could not approve the slightest breach.”

          And now the “wall of separation” is used to inhibit the Christian faithful from truly expressing their faith. And the folks doing this are the same people who demanded the closings of churches during the pandemic, even going to the point of trying to stop at one location a drive-in service where the minister spoke to the congregation via a low powered FM signal to the faithful listening in their cars.

          But, as it always does, the pendulum is now swinging back. The Supreme Court after using the “wall” to strike down prayers in public schools, Engel v. Vitale in 1962, and attempting to define what was excessive entanglement between the government and religion in 1971’s Lemon v. Kurtzman case, the Supreme Court now seems to be adopting a more tolerant viewpoint.

          Much of that came in last year’s decision in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District in which a football coach had been fired for praying after each game which attracted players and fans to join the coach at mid-field for a silent prayer. In ruling for the coach the court also struck down the complicated three-part Lemon test it had articulated in 1971.

          As Justice Neil Gorsuch spoke for the court:

          “Respect for religious expressions is indispensable to life in a free and diverse Republic—whether those expressions take place in a sanctuary or on a field, and whether they manifest through the spoken word or a bowed head. Here, a government entity sought to punish an individual for engaging in a brief, quiet, personal religious observance doubly protected by the Free Exercise and Free Speech Clauses of the First Amendment. And the only meaningful justification the government offered for its reprisal rested on a mistaken view that it had a duty to ferret out and suppress religious observances even as it allows comparable secular speech. The Constitution neither mandates nor tolerates that kind of discrimination.”

          So enjoy your Christmas season, both religious and secular. And to those calling you out for breaching that “wall” just remind them that you don’t need the three reindeer anymore.

 (You can reach Mike at: DeaconMike@q.com and listen to him every weekend on Faith On Trial or podcast at https://iowacatholicradio.com/faith-on-trial/)