Peter Kingston

English 2010-023
Jim Beatty
20 July 2015
The Truth of Separation of Church and State

The Separation of Church and State is used to denounce the discussion of religion in the
public arena today. (Barton, 2012) Many US citizens believe the phrase; Separation of Church
and State is written, or hard coded into the United States Constitution. The phrase "Separation
of Church and State" has been highly and repetitiously misinterpreted since the late 1950s. "...A
wall between Separation of Church and State." was a phrase directly from Thomas Jefferson's
letter to the Danbury Baptists that were being persecuted by the political officials of their region.
This letter was intended to reassure the practice of religion without official interference.
The Jefferson Letter to the Danbury Baptists is used as evidence to denounce religion in a
public setting when the letters true intentions were directly opposite to this agenda. The wall of
Separation isnt supposed to stop the display of Jesus in a public school or to remove school
sponsored prayers, like was literally done in the Engel v. Vitale (1962) and Abington School
District v. Schempp (1963) cases. Before these cases, this now well-known phrase was left
untouched for nearly a century and a half until the 1947 case Everson v. Board of Education,
where Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black put forth the novel interpretation that the First
Amendments establishment clause applied to the states and that any government support or
preference for religion amounts to an unconstitutional establishment of religion. To back up his
argument, he cited Jeffersons metaphor: The First Amendment has erected a wall of separation
between church and state. That wall must be kept high and impregnable.(Everson v. Board of
Education, 1947) Jeffersons actual aim was in complete opposition.

Peter Kingston
English 2010-023
Jim Beatty
20 July 2015
The Judicial system now completely ignores the fact that the intention of the phrase,
Separation between Church & State was used to make the government stay out of religious
affairs; they now use it to attack, denounce, or condone religious activities in the public,
government, or law setting. For the first 150 years of the American Judicial system, the court
referred to the letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1802 for protection from public religious
practices and the interference of government officials. David Barton (2012) says that,
There was a group who petitioned congress with the request that Separation of Church
and State should be used to remove religious practices from government functions (the
way that this idea is used today). Congress responded with a bold statement saying, Had
the people [the Founding Fathers], during the Revolution, a suspicion of any attempt to
war against Christianity, that Revolution would have been strangled in its cradle At the
time of the adoption of the Constitution and its amendments, the universal sentiment was
that Christianity should be encouraged, but not any one sect [denomination]. It also says:
In this age, there is no substitute for ChristianityThat was the religion of the founders
of the republic and they expected it to remain the religion of their descendants.(This was
a quote directly from the House Judiciary Committee Report in March 27, 1854) . The
House Judiciary Committee Report declared two months later with this statement to
refute any argument of a similar matter, The great vital and conservative element in our
system [the thing that holds our system together] is the belief of our people in the pure
doctrines and the divine truths of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Peter Kingston
English 2010-023
Jim Beatty
20 July 2015
Our founding judicial system was definitely against the idea of secularism in the public
arena, but today, it is secular. Its very true that the founding fathers had a system where
Christianity was able to flourish and declare openly the expressions and processes of the bible
and this was protected by the 1st amendment of the Constitution, as it was intended. Any
discussion of morality today is highly squandered and ridiculed by the liberal left, and also the
conservative right, in many cases, and it all falls down to the phrase Separation of Church and
State that is so out of context, that people believe Jefferson to be an atheist or a secularist
because of it. For those who dont believe and who dont quite understand the true intentions or
origins to the letter, Jefferson reassures his meaning by closing his letter with the quote,
I reciprocate your kind prayers for the protection & blessing of the common father and
creator of man, and tender you for yourselves & your religious association, assurances of
my high respect & esteem. (Jefferson, 1802)

Our Founding Fathers were great men with great visions, and there are no clear negative
side effects to having a nation based on the ethics and morality that these men followed.
However, there are loads of negative side effects with having a nation or a country that openly
denounces these principles. Without those two towers, you get chaos. Imagine a world without
any clearly written morality (without the bible). Engel v. Vitale (1962) and Abington School
District v. Schempp (1963) were the cases that illegalized state-sponsored prayer in schools. It
has been measured and recorded that the percentages of STDs, Births of Wedlock, and Rape have

Peter Kingston
English 2010-023
Jim Beatty
20 July 2015
all had a steady increase after these cases in the early 1960s. These problems were always steady
with the percentage Americans until this case. The SAT scores of the nation have also had a
major decline after these cases as well. (Barton, 2012).
The phrase we so commonly hear today is, Separation of Church and State,, and thats
the only phrase that is commonly quoted in this letter, and people misuse it all of the time
because they dont understand its original intent. It was not in the 1 st amendment as many people
falsely claim. Besides, the phrase is Separation of church and state, not Separation of God
from State (Barton, 2012), and it originally came from a letter that Jefferson wrote. Because
Jefferson, one of the founding fathers, wrote it, someone might say, This is proof that our
Founding Fathers had the same intentions for this phrase as our court systems do today.
Jefferson wasnt even in the United States during the writing of the Constitution, from May 25 to
September 17, 1787. He was in France serving as a prime minister during the entire writing
process. So, how would Jefferson be a Founding Father if he wasnt even involved in the
process of writing the Constitution? Jefferson said that the Constitutional Convention was an
assembly of demigods. It wasnt because he thought him and his pals were all high and mighty,
it was because he was referring to the actual Founding Fathers (the people who attended the
Constitutional Convention). (Klein, 2012) Our founding fathers did not intend to have this
misinterpretation and neither did Jefferson.