Book Recommendation: Dreisbach’s Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation Between Church and State

I just finished rendering Daniel Dreisbach’s Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation Between Church and State for a doctoral seminar this semester.

Dreisbach is a professor at American University and one of America’s premier historians on the First Amendment. Originally published in 2003, the book focuses exclusively on Jefferson’s famous phrase written to the Danbury Baptist Association. This may not sound original, but Dreisbach is concerned with peeling back the layers of history surrounding the events and political context of this famous letter. Seen in this light, the book is a very concentrated look at one famous phrase. The book evaluates the motive, text, and context of Jefferson’s letter to the Baptists. It then evaluates how the phrase has been interpreted by U.S. courts.

I highly recommend this book. As is the case with most subjects given focused attention, I walked away feeling like I have been sold a false bill of goods in how “church-state separation” is talked about today. It is customary to draw a straight line from Jefferson to today, and suppose that the American project is one of secularization. Not necessarily aiming to poke holes in the secularization thesis that comes with mindlessly quoting “a wall of separation between church and state” as most Americans reflexively do, Dreischbach nonetheless demonstrates the varying interpretations surrounding this phrase. The result is that the reader walks away with the sense that Americans have received their jurisprudence from a phrase, rather than an actual law—and inconsistently at that. As he demonstrates, Courts have used the phrase in different ways with “wall” being subject to varying interpretations. Sadly, these interpretations have left carnage in their wake, the result of which is the ever-expanding notion that the “wall” means only secularism. That simply isn’t the case, as Dreishbach shows, in how Jefferson used the metaphor in his understanding between the federal and state governments. Moreover, Jefferson’s metaphor isn’t controlling or authoritative. Not only had the “wall” metaphor been used prior to Jefferson and meant differently back then than it is today, other metaphors have been used as well to describe the relationship between church and state, but none of that matters, since Jefferson’s mythological status appears unquestioned.

Perhaps one of the most disturbing conclusions I found after reading the book is how inconsistent, contradictory, and frankly terrible the Supreme Court has been on First Amendment jurisprudence. I say that as neither a strict separationist nor a theocrat. The simple fact is that the Supreme Court has been either schizophrenic or drunk in its treatment of the First Amendment’s religion clauses. Our “separationist” jurisprudence of today arrived by no means of historical consensus or unanimity. Rather, since 1947’s Everson decision specifically, religion has been treated like an unwanted step-child.

If you’re interested in gaining a greater familiarity with a famous phrase that’s often used as a weapon in public life, you’d do well to purchase the book and read it.