The phrase "separation of church and state" originates in Thomas
Jefferson's 1802 letter
to the Baptist Association of Danbury,
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This is true. As Russell Kirk (The Roots of American Order,
p.437) notes
The First Amendment established no "wall of separation" between State and
Church; that phrase and that concept appear nowhere in the Constitution, or in any other
official national document. Thomas Jefferson, in 1802, wrote a letter to an assembly of
Baptists in which he argued that the First Amendment was intended to construct "a
wall of separation between Church and State." But though doubtless that is what
Jefferson desired from the First Amendment, it is by no means what Congress—and
particularly the Senate—had in mind when it passed the Amendment in 1789; nor was the
phrase "wall of separation" employed by Madison or any other notable advocate of
the Amendment."
When Jefferson's phrase "wall of separation between church and state" was
first used by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1878, they used it in a way which completely
refutes the modern notion of "separation." Read the Court's words here. |