Correcting the Record

The bulk of the Supreme Court’s church-state opinions have tended to give the misimpression that Thomas Jefferson and James Madison embraced a doctrine of absolute separation of church and state. William Rehnquist’s dissent in Wallace v. Jaffree, the Alabama “silent moment of prayer or meditation” case, offers a recent expression of the correct historical view. Justice Rehnquist’s arguments are, of course, unpopular with liberals, and have been attacked by them in The New Republic, among other places. If I defend his position, that is in part because his historical analysis in that case drew heavily on my recent book, Separation of Church and State: Historical Fact and Current Fiction, which the Justice cites.

Justice Rehnquist asserted that the Founding Fathers never intended to establish an absolute wall between church and state, but instead had a narrower goal: that of prohibiting the Federal Government from designating any one national church, or asserting a preference for one religious denomination or sect over others. Liberal orthodoxy holds that the Founders sought a much larger end. “There is no doubt,” wrote The New Republic’s analyst, expressing the liberal view, “that Madison had Virginia law in mind”—Jefferson’s Statute of Religious Liberty of 1786—“when he distilled his thoughts on religious liberty into ten words in the First Amendment to the new U.S. Constitution.” In fact, there is a great deal of doubt. In the first place, Madison did not even write the ten words of the First Amendment reading: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” As the Annals of the First Federal Congress show, Madison’s own proposal was much narrower. Madison’s proposed wording was: “. . . The civil rights of none shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national religion be established.

RC

About the Author

Robert L. Cord

Featured Tags

The bulk of the Supreme Court’s church-state opinions have tended to give the misimpression that Thomas Jefferson and James Madison embraced a doctrine of absolute separation of church and state. William Rehnquist’s dissent in Wallace v. Jaffree, the Alabama “silent moment of prayer or meditation” case, offers a recent expression of the correct historical view. Justice Rehnquist’s arguments are, of course, unpopular with liberals, and have been attacked by them in The New Republic, among other places. If I defend his position, that is in part because his historical analysis in that case drew heavily on my recent book, Separation of Church and State: Historical Fact and Current Fiction, which the Justice cites.

Justice Rehnquist asserted that the Founding Fathers never intended to establish an absolute wall between church and state, but instead had a narrower goal: that of prohibiting the Federal Government from designating any one national church, or asserting a preference for one religious denomination or sect over others. Liberal orthodoxy holds that the Founders sought a much larger end. “There is no doubt,” wrote The New Republic’s analyst, expressing the liberal view, “that Madison had Virginia law in mind”—Jefferson’s Statute of Religious Liberty of 1786—“when he distilled his thoughts on religious liberty into ten words in the First Amendment to the new U.S. Constitution.” In fact, there is a great deal of doubt. In the first place, Madison did not even write the ten words of the First Amendment reading: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” As the Annals of the First Federal Congress show, Madison’s own proposal was much narrower. Madison’s proposed wording was: “. . . The civil rights of none shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national religion be established.