Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
So reads the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, submitted by the 1st United States Congress to the states for ratification on September 25, 1789. In the centuries since its ratification, the First Amendment has come to be thoroughly identified with America’s lively and spirited political culture. Writing some 150 years later, Justice Robert Jackson would conclude that “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”11. West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. (1943), 642.
This “fixed star” has often been interpreted in absolutist terms. Justice Hugo Black—a First Amendment fundamentalist if ever there was one—famously read the Amendment strictly literally, remarking
I believe when our Founding Fathers, with their wisdom and patriotism, wrote this amendment, they wanted to ordain that Congress, elected by the people, should not tell the people what religion they should have or what they should believe or say or publish, and that is about it. It says ‘no law,’ and that is what I believe it means.22. https://www.nytimes.com/1962/06/11/archives/black-doubts-suits-for-libel-are-legal-black-doubtful-of-laws-on.html
In Justice Black’s view, the First Amendment strictly limited the interactions of church and state.33. Cantwell v. Connecticut. 310 U.S. 296. (1940); Everson v. Board of Education. 330 U.S. 1 (1947). Writing in Everson v. Board of Education, a case challenging a government scheme to fund student transportation to private, including parochial, schools, Black would argue that “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.’”44. Everson v. Board of Education. 330 U.S. 1 (1947). In his reading, the religion clauses were primarily intended to remedy a history of “turmoil, civil strife, and persecutions.” It did so by imposing a “strict separation” of the temporal and spiritual powers. “The First Amendment has erected a wall between church and state,” Black concludes, “That wall must be kept high and impregnable. We could not approve the slightest breach.”55. Everson. Justice Black’s rhetoric aside, the Court ruled that the law in question, which used public funds to pay transportation costs for students attending Catholic schools, did not violate the Establishment clause.
Black’s decision to draw on Thomas Jefferson’s language of the “wall of separation” radically reframed Establishment Clause jurisprudence. After all, the First Amendment, as ratified, only forbids Congress from establishing a religion: the constituent states were left free to establish or disestablish religion as they wished. Early American policy varied widely: once we take into account the various forms of establishment or state support for religion—including financial support for ministers, maintenance of glebe lands (tracts of income-generating property benefitting the church), control over ministerial licensure or appointments, systems of mandatory attendance or religious taxation, religious tests for office, etc.—several states extended their formal (if often toothless) establishment of religion well into the 20th century.66. This broader definition of establishment is drawn from Michael W. McConnell, “Establishment and Disestablishment at the Founding, Part I: Establishment of Religion.” William & Mary Law Review 44 (5). 2003. For a broad-ranging account of early American religious establishment, see Disestablishment and Religious Dissent: Church State Relations in the New American States, 1776–1833. Carl H. Esbeck and Jonathan J. Den Hartog, eds., University of Missouri Press, 2019.
By the 1940s, however, the Supreme Court ruled that the substantive protections of the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses applied to the states (a process known as incorporation). In the post-Everson era, the Establishment Clause was reinterpreted as a bulwark against any public or civic display of, or support for, religion. Subsequent cases in federal courts have successfully challenged the state designation of Good Friday as a state holiday,77. Freedom from Religion Foundation v. Thompson, 920 F. Supp. 969. W.D. Wis. February 23, 1996. institutionally mandated Bible reading in public schools,88. School District of Abington Township, Pennsylvania, v. Schempp. (1963). 374 U.S. 203. school-sponsored non-denominational prayer,99. Lee v. Weisman (1992). 505 U.S. 577. the installation of a nativity scene within a courthouse during the Christmas season,1010. County of Allegheny v. American Civil Liberties Union. 492 U.S. 573 (1989). and the erection of wooden crosses on public property memorializing slain highway patrol officers.1111. American Atheists, et al v. Duncan, et al. 637 F.3d. 1095 (10th Cir. 2010). Case was later reheard en banc as American Atheists, Inc. v. Davenport.
In the wake of such decisions, many conservatives and Christians—particularly among Reformed protestants—have questioned the view of the establishment clause, preferring some form of Christian nationalist or establishmentarian regime instead. Yet these reactions surrender the First Amendment too quickly. For what has been lost in the modernist interpretation of the First Amendment is the religious origins of the establishment clause. Contra Justice Black, the religion clauses of the First Amendment did not spring from Enlightenment rationalism or the ideal of a secular public sphere freed from religious influence. Instead, they represented the triumph of a particular and distinctly Protestant (and, to be specific, Baptist) account of the liberty of conscience that rejected religious coercion while still envisioning an expansive role for religion, in which Christianity could shape public life and policy.
Few things written on the First Amendment have been as deeply obfuscating as Hugo Black’s decision to rely on Thomas Jefferson’s beliefs to define the meaning of the First Amendment. While Jefferson may have played a limited role in the fight for religious freedom, there is little reason to give his interpretation primacy. Despite dominating Black’s reading of the law, Jefferson was in France while the Amendment was debated, with his role in promoting the Amendment largely confined to occasional correspondence with James Madison. Moreover, as a rationalist and republican, Jefferson’s hostility toward religious influence in politics was uncharacteristic of the other framers—including most of those who supported the First Amendment. The Amendment was established thanks to an uneasy alliance between Enlightenment deists and the deeply religious—what Sidney Mead famously called the “rationalist-pietist alliance.” The pious—like the Baptist pastors Isaac Backus and John Leland—who supported the Amendment saw it as narrowly forbidding religious coercion, rather than barring religious influence in the public sphere. Jefferson’s view was marginal: despite his apparent attempts to court the Baptists who had allied to secure the Amendment (including his famous letter to the Danbury Baptists on the “wall of separation”), contemporary evidence shows that few, if any, supported Jefferson’s view.1212. See Philip Hamburger, The Separation of Church and State. In choosing to elevate Jefferson over, say, Backus, Justice Black sided with those Enlightenment deists and 20th-century liberals for whom the separation of church and state came to represent a sort of contempt for the very religious faith—and religious influence in politics—that birthed it.
In this essay, I hope to recover the religious frame of the First Amendment, demonstrating that it guarantees the liberty of conscience while presenting no barrier to a robust Christian presence and influence in public life. I begin by charting the development of the doctrine of religious liberty among English Baptists, before demonstrating the role of American thinkers such as Roger Williams, Isaac Backus, and John Leland in providing both theoretical and political support for the First Amendment. I conclude by offering a re-reading of the First Amendment that recognizes the central role of conscience, reorienting First Amendment interpretation toward its proper—and original—meaning.
The Liberty of Conscience
The American story of religious liberty, as it is most frequently told, begins with the “Pilgrims”—protestant separatists who traveled first to Holland, then to the New World aboard the Mayflower in search of religious liberty. This congregation would have an outsized effect on the world. While still in Holland, a member named Thomas Helwys would draft what is perhaps the first Baptist confession of faith, which sets out a distinctive view of government authority. “Magistracy is a Holy ordinance of God,” Helwys writes, “that every soul ought to be subject to it not for fear only, but for conscience sake.”1313. A Declaration of Faith of English People Remaining at Amsterdam in Holland” (1611). Magistrates are “ministers of God to take vengeance on them that do evil,” and as such it is “a fearful sin to speak evil of them that are in authority, and to despise Government.” Moreover, Helwys (unlike some protestants) did not declaim the possibility of Christians in government: the church ought to pray that “God would have them [magistrates] saved,” but that they may retain their civil position, “for no Holy Ordinance of GOD debars any from being a member of CHRISTS Church.”
Notably, however, Helwys limits government’s rightful scope: that the civil magistrate is tasked with promoting the “wealth” of citizens and punishing evildoers does not grant them carte blanche authority over their subjects. Instead, as Helwys argues in his 1611/1612 tract A Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity, “an earthly sword is ordained of God only for an earthly power, and a spiritual sword for a spiritual power.”1414. Thomas Helwys and Richard Groves, ed., A Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity. Mercer University Press, 1998. 35. The earthly sword, delegated by God to the civil magistrate, is to be used only to punish civil offenses: it is given only for “the well-governing and ruling of a king’s state and kingdom, which is worldly and must fade away.”1515. Helwys and Groves, The Mystery of Iniquity. 39. Spiritual affairs, by contrast, belong to “the kingdom of Christ, which is heavenly and endures forever.”1616. Helwys and Groves, The Mystery of Iniquity. 38–39. Though well-meaning Christian magistrates may think themselves to be serving God when they prosecute false religion, Helwys argues that they usurp Christ’s divine prerogative to punish spiritual error. Accordingly, Helwys concludes that the civil authority must remain wholly contained to civil affairs: so long as citizens remain obedient to proper civil law, “let them be heretics, Turkes, Jews, or whatsoever, it appertains not to the earthly power to punish them in the least measure.”1717. Helwys and Groves, The Mystery of Iniquity. 53.
Helwys’s distinction between civil and spiritual authorities was taken up by other Baptists, including Henry Jacob, Leonard Busher, Hanserd Knollys, and John Vernon. Several of these would become prominent figures in the growth of the Calvinistic Particular Baptists, and bring this view of the civil magistracy to the 1646 London Baptist Confession, which echoes Helwys in asserting that the civil magistracy is “an ordinance of God, set up by Him for the punishment of evil doers, and for the praise of them that do well.”1818. A Confession of faith of seven congregations or churches of Christ in London, which are commonly, but unjustly called Anabaptists” (1646). Though the confession praises the “king and parliament (now established)” for “throwing down the prelatical hierarchy,” it reiterates that “concerning the worship of God; there is but one lawgiver … which is Jesus Christ, who hath given laws and rules sufficient in His word for His worship.”1919. Ibid. To “make more, were to charge Christ with want of wisdom, or faithfulness, or both, in not making laws enough, or not good enough for His house.”2020. Ibid. Accordingly, the confession continues, the magistrates’ duty is “to tender the liberty of mens’ consciences … which is the tenderest thing unto all conscientious men, and most dear unto them, and without which all other liberties will not be worth the naming, much less enjoying.”2121. Ibid.
“A hedge of separation”
As the London Baptists formulated their relationship with the civil magistracy, Roger Williams collided with the civil magistrates of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. A Cambridge- educated minister with Separatist leanings, Williams was initially welcomed by Governor John Winthrop and offered an interim post in the Boston church.2222. Williams’ spiritual journey was varied: after taking holy orders in the Anglican church, he became persuaded of separatism and later helped found the first Baptist Church in America—which he left several years later. Williams, however, declined, on the grounds that the congregation remained unseparated from the Church of England. Williams’ dissenting bent soon led to trouble: several years later, he was banished from the colony. The charges levelled against Williams were many: he had called doubt on the legitimacy of the colonial land patent; he had argued that “it is not lawfull to call a wicked person to Sweare, to Pray, as being actions of Gods Worship”; he had claimed that it was unlawful to hear “any of the Ministers of the Parish Assemblies in England”; and finally, had asserted “That the Civill Magistrates power extends only to the Bodies and Goods, and outward state of men, &c.”2323. Related by Williams in Mr. Cottons Letter Lately Printed, Examined and Answered (1644).
The distinction between the inward (spiritual) and outward (civil) state of men proved critical for Williams’ understanding of church-state relations. Williams had spent months among the Native Americans, studying their language and culture in the hopes of effectively evangelizing them. The product of this study—Williams’ A Key Into the Language of America reveals his judgment that the natives were fully capable of practicing “civility”, their pagan spiritual state notwithstanding. In fact, Williams claims that the Natives often outstripped the colonists in good behavior, writing:
When Indians hear the horrid filths Of Irish, English Men, The horrid Oaths and Murthers late Thus say these Indians then. We wear no Cloaths, have many Gods And yet our sinnes are lesse: You are Barbarians, Pagans wild, Your Land’s the Wildernesse.2424. Williams, A Key Into the Language of America in The Complete Writings of Roger Williams. Russell and Russell, 1963. Vol. I. 227.
Though perhaps exaggerated for effect, Williams contradicted those who viewed religious conformity as essential for civil peace. If spiritual and civil spheres are distinct, it is possible for pagans to practice civility and live together with Christians in decent political communities.
Williams conceives of the civil sphere as a wilderness in which pagans and believers live intermixed. Within that wilderness, the church is a garden completely surrounded by a “hedge of separation.” This separation was intended to protect the church from an encroaching world, rather than to preserve (as Hugo Black would frame it) the civil sphere from religious influence. The church is bound to practice internal self-discipline, casting out “idolaters, extortioners, covetous … the obstinate in sinne” just as gardeners pluck up weeds from within the garden. Yet this spiritual discipline only needs to cover the church itself, for “If the weeds be kept out of the Garden of the Church, the Roses and Lilies therein will flourish, notwithstanding that weeds abound in the Field of the Civill State.”2525. Williams, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience (1644)(Hereafter Bloudy Tenent) in The Complete Writings of Roger Williams,Vol. 3 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1963), 187. By the same token, he disavows that “because briars, thornes, and thistles may not be in the Garden of the Church, therefore they must all bee pluckt up out of the Wildernesse.”2626. Williams, Bloudy Tenent, 95.
The chief error of “Christendome,” in Williams’ view, was that by attempting to maintain “their Religion by the material Sword … by degrees the Gardens of the Churches of Saints were turned into the Wildernesse of whole Nations.”2727. Williams, Bloudy Tenent, 184. Christian monarchs had, by unwitting zeal, “opened a gap between the Garden of the Church and the Wilderness of the world,” with the disastrous effect of flooding the church with unbelievers performing coerced acts of false worship.2828. Williams, Mr. Cotton’s Letter Lately Printed, Examined, and Answered in The Complete Writings of Roger Williams (1654) (New York: Russell and Russell, 1963), 392. This posed substantial problems, given Baptist ecclesiology. The 1646 Baptist Confession identifies the Church as “a company of visible saints, called and separated … to the visible profession of the gospel, being baptized into that faith, and joined to the Lord, and each other, by mutual agreement.”2929. 1646 Baptist Confession. Article XXXIII. Much like Williams, the writers of the 1646 Confession adopted the metaphor of a garden, writing that the saints are “to lead their lives in this walled sheepfold and watered garden.”3030. Ibid. Article XXXV. Moreover, “every church hath power given them from Christ … to choose among themselves meet persons for elders and deacons … none have any power to impose on them either these or any others.”3131. Ibid. Article XXXVI. Not only does the church have collective authority to select officers according to Scriptural qualifications, but “Christ hath likewise given power to His Church to receive in, and cast out, any member that deserves it; and this power is given to every congregation, and not to one particular person, either member or officer, but in relation to the whole body, in reference to their faith and fellowship.”3232. Ibid., Article XLII. Emphasis added.
This view of ecclesiology presupposes regenerate church membership: the “visible saints” are professing, baptized believers who have been recognized and admitted into the church by the existing membership. As Baptists interpret Jeremiah 31 and Hebrews 8 to mean that the New Covenant comprises believers only, the visible church attempts to approximate this covenant community to the best of its ability by only admitting into membership professing, baptized believers bearing the fruit of the Holy Spirit. Only then is the church itself competent to not only ordain pastors and elders but also exercise the church discipline necessary to keep the garden free of weeds.3333. It is for this reason that Baptist churches must have a high view of church membership and discipline, for a church that fails to carefully guard membership and to practice discipline will be unable to exercise its authority in all purity and faithfulness. A church flooded with unregenerate members performing acts of compulsory false piety will be rendered incapable of sustaining the tasks assigned to it by Christ. This is the fundamental reasoning behind the “hedge of separation”: as Williams would have us remember, the wilderness is always attempting to creep in upon the garden; and so let not civil authorities aid it in doing so by tearing down its hedge.
Establishing Religious Liberty
Though Williams was responsible for articulating a colonial Baptist view of church-state relations, it took the herculean efforts of other Baptist preachers to see this view enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. Foremost among these were Isaac Backus (b. 1724) and John Leland (b. 1754). Backus, a long-time Separate preacher, became a Baptist in 1751, eventually founding the First Baptist Church of Middleborough. Backus and a number of his followers were arrested and imprisoned for their refusal to pay a parish tax supporting the construction of a new meetinghouse for the established church. This incident—surprisingly typical of the colonial Baptist experience—lit a fire in Backus’ life. By the late 1760s, Backus began working alongside the newly established Warren Association (comprised of delegates from a number of New England Baptist churches) to campaign for greater religious liberty. Backus was quick to connect the problem of religious establishment with growing colonial discontent with the Crown, writing “the two main rights which all America are contending for this day are—Not to be taxed where they are not represented, and—To have their cases tried by unbiased judges.”3434. Letter from Isaac Backus, acting as Agent for the Baptist Committee of Grievances, to Congress of the Massachusetts province. December 2, 1774. Contained in Alvah Hovey, A memoir of the life and times of the Rev. Isaac Backus, A.M. Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1859. 216. After affirming the Baptist sympathy with the American cause, he notes that the colonists complained of “a tax of three pence per pound upon tea; but your law of last June laid a tax of the same sum every year upon the Baptists in each parish … they can avoid it by not buying the tea; but we have no such liberty.”3535. Ibid., 220–221.
Despite Backus’ efforts, the Massachusetts legislature proved remarkably resistant, offering little relief to the Baptists who had been forced to pay religious taxes. A few years later, as Massachusetts considered a new state constitution, Backus would propose the inclusion of a Bill of Rights, reading, in part:
As God is the only worthy object of all religious worship, and nothing can be true religion but a voluntary obedience unto his revealed will, of which each rational soul has an equal right to judge for itself; every person has an unalienable right to act in all religious affairs according to the full persuasion of his own mind, where others are not injured thereby.3636. In Isaac Backus on Church, State, and Calvinism: Pamphlets, 1754–1789. Ed. William G. McLoughlin. Belknap Press of Harvard, 1968. 487–488.
Once again, Backus’ enjoinders fell on deaf ears: the Massachusetts constitution formally established Congregationalism. The promoters of disestablishment would be more successful at the federal level, however. John Leland—a generation younger than the elder Backus—was one of the most influential preachers of the revolutionary-era United States, preaching and baptizing across Virginia and the Carolinas in a largely itinerant ministry. Like Backus, Leland became involved in Baptist associational life, working to reject proposed religious assessments and to secure a bill for religious liberty in his home state of Virginia.
By 1788, religious liberty became a central topic of debate regarding the ratification of the newly proposed federal Constitution. The sizable Baptist community in northern Virginia, including in James Madison’s home county, was largely sympathetic to the Antifederalists, who opposed ratification. Elder Leland laid out his own objections to the Constitution in a letter to Thomas Barbour, Madison’s main challenger in the election for delegates to the Virginia ratifying convention. Leland begins the letter complaining of a lack of Bill of Rights, concluding:
What is clearest of all—Religious Liberty, is not sufficiently secured … if a Majority of Congress with the President favour one System more than another, they may oblige all others to pay to the support of their system as much as they please, and if Oppression does not ensue, it will be owing to the Mildness of Administration and not to any Constitutional defence.3737. This letter was sent by Leland to Barbour by way of Joseph Spencer, who copied its entirety and included it in a February 28, 1788 letter to James Madison. Copy of Letter from John Leland to Thomas Barbour. www.loc.gov/exhibits/religion/rel06.html#obj148
Despite fierce local opposition, something happened—evidence suggests that James Madison met with John Leland on the eve of the election—and the Baptist bloc supported Madison’s election to the Virginia ratifying convention, and, in turn, to the first Congress. Despite long opposing the inclusion of a Bill of Rights, Madison would himself propose a list of amendments to the Constitution, including a statement 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 pretext, infringed.”
This proposed amendment (fourth, in Madison’s numbering), continues on to guarantee the “right to speak, or to write, or to publish their sentiments,” as well as the freedom of press, the right to peaceably assemble, and the right of petition—namely, the other rights in the present First Amendment. Madison, moreover, ambitiously included an additional proposed amendment, to read (in part) “No State shall violate the equal rights of conscience.” These proposals, historians agree, were largely thanks to the influence of Madison’s friend John Leland.
Leland’s concern for religious liberty followed from the Baptist convictions he shared with Williams and Backus. Writing in a 1791 pamphlet entitled The Rights of Conscience Inalienable, Leland would argue that as “Every man must give an account of himself to God,” then “every man ought to be at liberty to serve God in a way that he can best reconcile to his conscience.”3838. John Leland, The Rights of Conscience Inalienable. Reprinted in The Sacred Rights of Conscience. Daniel L. Dreisbach and Mark David Hall, eds. Liberty Fund, 2009. 337. Salvation and damnation operated on an individual principle rather than by blood or citizenship, and so the individual must be left free to exercise his faith according to conscience. “If government can answer for individuals at the day of judgment,” Leland continues, “…let men be controlled by it in religious matters; otherwise, let men be free.”3939. Ibid. 337. Though Leland recognizes the authority of government to restrict actions that harm others (such as religious violence), he reiterates that “the religious opinions of men [are not] the objects of civil government, nor in any way under its control.”4040. Ibid. 337. This doctrine, it seems, was enshrined in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Religion Under the First Amendment
In this brief historical survey, I have gestured at how the First Amendment guarantees of religious liberty arose out of the ideas of colonial Baptists who saw matters of religious conscience as beyond the rightful purview of the state. Faithful treatment of the First Amendment’s religious clauses must recognize the key role that religion played in their formulation and adoption. In this final section, I hope to sketch a few substantive implications that arise from this retrieval.
Contra the strict separationists, no plausible and historical reading of the First Amendment’s purpose can conclude that it was meant to prohibit religious influence in politics. The “hedge” or “wall” of separation was meant to protect faith from legal coercion, rather than to restrain religion. As Isaac Backus wrote in 1773, “Religious matters are to be separated from the jurisdiction of the state not because they are beneath the interests of the state, but, quite to the contrary, because they are too high and holy and thus are beyond the competence of the state.”4141. Isaac Backus, “Appeal to the Public for Religious Liberty,” 1773. The Amendment itself stemmed from their willingness to not only voice religious reasons for their preferred political policies, but also their willingness to move and exert influence as a bloc of citizens and voters to secure that goal. It would be strange indeed if the First Amendment forbade the type of religious influence in politics that secured it.
In the eyes of those who promoted it, the First Amendment was in no sense meant to exclude religion from public life, nor even, for that matter, to bar public displays of Christianity. Instead, the Baptists solidly aimed at three features of the British-style establishment: direct governmental interference in areas of worship and doctrine (such as licensure and ordination), compulsory taxation or attendance, and formal discrimination between religions in civil affairs.4242. Philip Hamburger, The Separation of Church and State. 180–181. Compulsory religious taxation was the issue du jour, and Backus, Leland, and other Founding-era proponents of religious liberty were more focused on ending this form of establishment than on erecting a “high and impregnable” wall between religion and state.
Though Leland and Backus differed on some particulars, both saw ample room for religious engagement in politics. Those of the accommodationist persuasion, like Backus, could still support the use of religious oaths of office, Sabbath or “blue” laws, and publicly-appointed chaplains (so long as they were supported by voluntary contributions rather than assessments). Backus’ objection to religious coercion aside, he nonetheless argued that “civil rulers ought undoubtedly to be nursing fathers to the church, by reproof, exhortation, and their own good and liberal example, as well as to protect and defend her against injustice and oppression.”4343. Letter from Isaac Backus, supra note 35. 217.
Early American Baptists saw religion playing an essential role in civil affairs. Several southern Baptist associations, for instance, took issue with Jefferson’s hesitance to publicly proclaim days of fasting and prayer; others restated their view that presidents and political leaders ought to seek to obey a higher power—all of this consistent with their belief that the state ought not to engage in religious coercion. Even John Leland, who held perhaps the most strictly separationist view among his generation of Baptist clergy, clearly saw no bar to religious politicking. Leland was happy to use his influence within the Baptist community to promote particular political goals, including pressuring James Madison to support the First Amendment. In fact, Jefferson’s “wall of separation” notwithstanding, Leland preached (at President Jefferson’s invitation) in the House of Representatives on January 3, 1802.4444. In one of the more delightful vignettes of early 19th century political life, Leland was in Washington for the occasion of delivering to President Jefferson a 1,200-pound cheese manufactured by the community of Cheshire, Massachusetts, where Leland pastored. Leland arrived and met with Jefferson the same day that Jefferson dispatched his letter advocating the “wall of separation.”
Contemporary religious critics of the First Amendment often echo the concerns of colonial era Congregationalists—that Baptist-style “separation” would exclude Christian influence from a strictly secular public sphere. Yet the words and actions of the Baptists themselves show no such impulse, while the First Amendment, properly understood and freed from the tyranny of strict separationism, poses no bar to the development and cultivation of robustly Christian engagement and influence in public affairs. In this one peculiar sense, however, the First Amendment represents a type of establishment: namely, the triumph of a particular protestant—and really, Baptist—account of conscience over the many alternatives. The First Amendment, it has long been said, refuses to pick winners and losers among religious sects—yet the clear winner is those that share the colonial Baptist conviction that Christianity must be free to shape civic life, while religion must be freed from legal coercion.
