By Jamie Raskin, a professor of constitutional law and the First Amendment at American University's Washington College of Law and a Maryland State Senator. He is the author of several books, including We the Students: Supreme Court Cases for and about America's Students, and founded the Marshall-Brennan Constitutional Literacy Project.
Delaware Republican Senate nominee Christine O'Donnell looked ridiculous Tuesday when she questioned whether a prohibition on establishment of religion is actually part of the First Amendment. She was on only slightly firmer ground when she aggressively challenged her Democratic rival, Chris Coons, to show her where the "separation of church and state" is found in the First Amendment. Of course, the phrase does not literally appear in the First Amend
ment, but it was President Thomas Jefferson's cogent recapitulation of what the Establishment Clause and Free Exercise Clauses together created for the American people, and we should take this opportunity to celebrate his indispensable metaphor.
In his famous 1802 Letter to the Danbury Baptists, who sought his help in escaping a state tax selectively imposed to fund the Congregationalist churches, Jefferson developed the image that has indeed become our national shorthand for understanding the First Amendment's religion clauses. Jefferson wrote:
Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between church and state. (emphasis added)
Notice that this original explanation of the "wall of separation" depends centrally on the freedom of each person to follow his or her own religious and spiritual path without official interference. The state may not endorse specific religious doctrines and impose them on the public because that slide into theocracy would destroy or threaten the religious freedom of everyone who belongs to another religion (or none at all). Conservatives who attack the wall of separation are attacking the very idea that has given Americans the freedom and security to become among the most religious people on earth.