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Building the “Wall of Separation”: Construction Zone for Historians
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 November 2010
Extract
The argument of Mark deWolfe Howe's The Garden and the Wilderness turned on the contrast Howe drew between two uses of a single phrase: “wall of separation.” Thomas Jefferson used the phrase in 1802, in a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association: “I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between church and state.” More than a century and a half earlier, in 1644, the colonial advocate of religious freedom Roger Williams had employed the same phrase in a letter to his theological opponent, the Reverend John Cotton of Boston. According to Williams's reading of the Bible, the people of God—Jews and Christians—were “separate from the world,” and, “when they have opened a gap in the hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world, God hath ever broke down the wall itself, removed the candlestick, and made His garden a wilderness, as at this day. And that therefore if He will ever please to restore His garden and paradise again, it must of necessity be walled in peculiarly unto Himself from the world; and that all that shall be saved out of the world are to be transplanted out of the wilderness of the world, and added unto his church or garden.”
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References
1 Howe, Mark deWolfe, The Garden and the Wilderness: Religion and Government in American Constitutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 1–9Google Scholar.
2 Jefferson, Thomas, “To Messrs. Nehemiah Dodge and Others, a Committee of the Danbury Baptist Association, in the State of Connecticut,” in Thomas Jefferson: Writings (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1984), 510Google Scholar.
3 Williams, Roger, Mr. Cotton's Letter Lately Printed, Examined and Answered, in The Complete Writings of Roger Williams, ed. Guild, Reuben Aldridge (New York: Russell and Russell, 1963), 1:392Google Scholar.
4 Howe, Garden and the Wilderness, 109, 75–76, 65, 150, 157–58, 149.
5 Ibid., 154, 157, 154.
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7 Howe, Garden and the Wilderness, 109, 138, 155.
8 Ibid., 152, 154, 19, 9 (emphasis added). For further use of the distinction between “skeptics and believers” in which “doubt” is identified entirely with the Jeffersonian tradition, see 7, 10, 15, 18–19.
9 Ibid., 19 (emphasis added).
10 Ibid., 6, 149.
11 This interpretation of Williams's thought is argued in my earlier study, The Millenarian Piety of Roger Williams (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979).
12 Williams, Cotton's Letter . . . Examined, 361.
13 Ibid., 339, 335.
14 Ibid., 327.
15 Ibid., 335. For examples from the Revolutionary era of the continuing residual influence of the “two tables” distinction, see Howe, Garden and the Wilderness, 24–25.
16 LaFantasie, Glenn W., ed., The Correspondence of Roger Williams (Providence: Rhode Island Historical Society / Brown University Press / University Press of New England, 1988), 2:423–25Google Scholar. For a careful analysis of this letter, see Hall, Timothy J., Separating Church and State: Roger Williams and Religious Liberty (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 108–9Google Scholar.
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19 Howe, Garden and the Wilderness, 18.
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