LETTER: The myth of 'separation'

The myth of separation of church and state has been going on for years, ever since the phrase was mentioned in Everson v. Board of Education (1947).

Separation of church and state does not appear in our Constitution nor in the First Amendment, as those who would remove all reference to Christianity in our nation would have you believe. The phrase originated in a letter from Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptists assuring them the federal government was not considering making a single denomination of Christianity the national denomination.

This was some 10 years after the ratification of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Christianity was the basis of the morals and natural rights upon which this nation was founded. Not a particular denomination of Christianity, but Christianity as a whole. An excellent book on this subject, discussing the intent of Congress on our constitution and its amendments is “The Myth of Separation” by David Barton.

George Mason, a Virginia plantation owner, drafted the Virginia Bill of Rights in 1776. He later drafted 12 amendments for our national Bill of Rights, of which only 10 were ratified. Amendment 20 of the Virginia Bill of Rights was the basis of our First Amendment to the Constitution. Here is what it says: “20. That Religion, or the Duty which we owe to our Creator, and the Manner of discharging it, can be directed only by Reason and Conviction, not by Force or Violence, and therefore all men have an equal natural and unalienable right to the free Exercise of Religion, according to the Dictates of Conscience, and that no particular religious Sect or Society of Christians ought to be favored or established by Law, in preference to others.”

Joseph Story was a U.S. Supreme Court justice who wrote extensively about the U.S. Constitution. His writings were first published in 1833 and are found in a current printing of “Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States” by Joseph Story. Here is what he said about the First Amendment (pp. 380, comment 991): “The real object of the amendment was, not to countenance, much less to advance Mahometanism, or Judaism, or infidelity, by prostrating Christianity; but to exclude all rivalry among Christian sects, and to prevent any national ecclesiastical establishment, which should give to an hierarchy the exclusive patronage of the national government. It thus sought to cut off the means of religious persecution (the vice and pest of former ages) and the power of subverting the rights and conscience in matters of religion, which had been trampled upon almost from the days of the Apostles to the present age.”

This is exactly why we need to find a true constitutionalist to replace Antonin Scalia instead of someone who legislates from the bench based on what they think the Constitution ought to say.

—Warren Williamson, Lakeside