So, the infamous Christian nationalist history revisionist David Barton, who has done more than any other man, living or dead, to eradicate the real history of our country in favor of a carefully constructed, decades-in-the-making, alternate Christian pseudo-history, is back in the news. I cannot overestimate the power that this dangerous man has had in both our federal and state governments, and now has again, possibly to an even greater degree, because of his close ties to the newly-ordained Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, whose own Christian nationalism and admiration for Barton is unnerving, to say the least.
Most of you here know me for my posts about the battles fought by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) against the Christian nationalism that blights our military, but my entry into the fight against Christian nationalism some two decades ago was as a debunker of the pseudo-historical lies being propagated by those who would have us governed by the Bible rather than the Constitution, the most prolific and damaging of whom was, and continues to be, David Barton.
Shortly after I released the first volume of my book Liars For Jesus: The Religious Right’s Alternate Version of American History in 2006, I was asked to write on the blog Talk2Action, which I started doing in early 2007, and in May of that year, after being tipped off that there was an adaptation of a David Barton essay about the “myth” of separation of church and state in the Junior ROTC’s core curriculum American history textbook, I wrote a piece titled “The Department of Defense —Bringing Historical Revisionism to a High School Near You”. That piece caught the attention of a supporter of Mikey Weinstein and MRFF, who introduced me to Mikey, and I’ve been working for MRFF ever since.
In a video he recorded back in 2012 when Barton went after him, Mikey told Barton that he wanted his address so that he could send him a fruit basket in appreciation of his bringing me together with MRFF.
If, after reading the book chapter that follows, you decide you just can’t get enough of history and want to read my Liars For Jesus book, I suggest that you start with Volume 2, the reason being that I am currently working on a new, updated edition of Volume 1, so you might want to wait for that. (You don’t have to have read Volume 1 before reading Volume 2; both volumes are self-contained.)
And, if you want to delve into the very interesting history of what happened in Connecticut after Jefferson’s famous “wall of separation” letter, I’ve got a book for that, to: From Theocracy To Religious Liberty: Connecticut’s Journey from Thomas Jefferson’s “Wall of Separation” Letter to a State Constitution, as Told Through the Newspapers of the Time
Now, on with 10,000 or so words debunking Barton’s big lie that the separation of church and state is a “myth.” Enjoy!
Liars For Jesus: The Religious Right’s Alternate Version of American History, Volume 2
— CHAPTER TWELVE —
Jefferson’s Letter to the Danbury Baptists
The main purpose of almost all Christian nationalist lies about Thomas Jefferson’s 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists – the letter in which he coined his famous metaphor “a wall of separation between church and state” – is to make it appear that what Jefferson meant was a one-way wall, intended only to keep the government out of the church, but not the church out of the government. The wall needs to be one-way to fit their larger arguments, both historical and to do with current issues, in which it is only the free exercise of religion that matters, and that the other religion clause in the First Amendment – the Establishment Clause – simply doesn’t exist.
So, how do they make Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists fit their one-way version of the wall of separation? Very simple. They lie about why these Baptists wrote to Jefferson in the first place. They claim that the reason the Baptists wrote to Jefferson was because they were afraid that the First Amendment, by addressing the subject of religion at all, opened the door for the federal government to someday interfere with their religious freedom, or even establish a national religion. Once they’ve got their audience believing that this was the reason the Baptists wrote to Jefferson, they can claim that Jefferson’s reply was merely a reassurance to these Baptists that they had nothing to fear from the federal government, and that all Jefferson meant by a wall of separation was that the federal government would never interfere with their free exercise of religion or establish a national religion. The problem with this claim? The Danbury Baptists weren’t talking about the federal government in their letter. They were talking about their state government, the government of Connecticut, which we’ll get to later in this chapter. But first let’s look at the basic lie.
This is a typical version, from William Federer’s book America’s God and Country Encyclopedia of Quotations:
On January 1, 1802, Jefferson wrote a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association of Danbury, Connecticut, calming their fears that Congress was not in the process of choosing any one single Christian denomination to be the “state” denomination, as was the case with the Anglican Church in England and Virginia.
Usually added is some kind of claim to make Jefferson’s reply to the Baptists seem like it’s irrelevant and shouldn’t be brought into the debate. Most revisionists do this by claiming that it was a private or personal letter, and some by claiming that it was a hastily written note that Jefferson put little thought into. In his version, William Federer makes it a personal letter:
This personal letter reassured the Baptists that the government’s hands were tied from interfering with, or in any way controlling, the affairs or decisions of the churches in America.
Similarly, David Barton says in his book Original Intent:
Earlier Courts had always viewed Jefferson’s Danbury letter for what it was: a personal, private letter to a specific group.
Any claims that Jefferson’s reply to the Baptists was a personal or private letter or that it was just a hastily written note are ridiculous. Jefferson was well aware that this letter would be made public. The fact that the existing copy of the letter is actually Jefferson’s first draft, with carefully considered changes and notes in the margin, proves that this letter was neither hastily written nor a letter that he thought would remain private. He even had two different New Englanders in his administration, Postmaster General Gideon Granger of Connecticut and Attorney General Levi Lincoln of Massachusetts, read his draft to make sure there was nothing in it that might offend any of his New England political allies, and on the advice of Levi Lincoln deleted a paragraph explaining his refusal to proclaim any national days of fasting or thanksgiving. Although not a common practice in the South, this was a respected “habit,” as Jefferson put it, in the much more religious New England states, noting in the margin of his draft:
paragraph was omitted on the suggestion that it might give uneasiness to some of our republican friends in the eastern states where the proclamation of thanksgivings etc. by their Executives is an antient habit & is respected.
Obviously, running his draft by two members of his administration, making changes at their suggestion, and noting the reasons in the margin are hardly things that Jefferson would have done if this had been a private, personal letter as the revisionists claim.
In his book The Jefferson Lies, Barton added a new twist to the basic lie, beginning his section about Jefferson’s letter to the Baptists with a little bit of stage setting. His eventual claim is still going to be that the Danbury Baptists were afraid that the First Amendment could open the door to interference with religion by the federal government, so he starts off with a paragraph about how Baptists in America had been persecuted:
When Jefferson, the head of the Anti-Federalists, became president in 1801, his election was particularly well received by the Baptists. This political disposition was understandable, for from the early settlement of Rhode Island in the 1630s to the time of the writing of the federal Constitution in 1787, the Baptists had often found their free exercise limited by state-established government power. Baptist ministers had often been beaten, imprisoned, and even faced death from the government church, so it was not surprising that they strongly opposed centralized government power. For this reason the predominantly Baptist state of Rhode Island refused to send delegates to the Constitutional Convention; and the Baptists were the only denomination in which a majority of its clergy across the nation voted against ratification of the Constitution.
Yes, it is absolutely true that the Baptists had been persecuted. But fear of religious persecution had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the reason that Rhode Island opposed a strong central government and refused to send delegates to the Constitutional Convention. It also had nothing to do with the reason that the majority of the Baptist ministers who were delegates to their state’s ratifying conventions voted against ratification.
Let’s start with Barton’s completely false claim that a fear of religious persecution was why Rhode Island opposed a strong central government and refused to send delegates to the Constitutional Convention.
The real reason that Rhode Island didn’t want a strong central government and didn’t send delegates to the Constitutional Convention was that the state had turned into a haven for smugglers and criminals, run by a completely corrupt legislature. A strong central government would put a stop to the legislature’s money scams and other illegal activities going on in the state. Rhode Island in 1787 was not at all the same Rhode Island that Roger Williams had founded in the 1630s as a haven for religious dissenters. In addition to its corrupt legislature, the state had become a haven for criminals of all sorts.
The story of how Rhode Island became so out of sync with the rest of the states by the time of the Constitutional Convention begins six years earlier, with the impost of 1781, a measure proposed by the Continental Congress when it desperately needed to raise money to pay the public debt from the Revolutionary War. Under the Articles of Confederation, the Continental Congress had the power to borrow money, but had no power to levy taxes to pay that money back. The voluntary contributions, known as requisitions, that the states were supposed to be making were not enough, and often weren’t paid at all. The Congress didn’t even have the money to pay the interest on America’s debts to France and Holland, let alone pay the debts off. So, in 1781, an amendment to the Articles of Confederation was proposed to allow the Congress to levy a five percent duty on imports until the war debt was paid off.
An amendment to the Articles of Confederation required the consent of all thirteen states, and by the middle of 1782, all of the states had granted their consent to the impost except for Georgia and Rhode Island. Georgia was thought likely to consent, even though it hadn’t yet formally done so, but Rhode Island had made it abundantly clear that it would not consent.
In October 1782, the Congress passed a resolution demanding an definite answer from Georgia and Rhode Island. Georgia, as expected, gave its assurance that it planned to consent, but Rhode Island, also as expected, refused. Rhode Island’s refusal caused several other states to revoke their consent after having initially granted it. Maryland’s act granting its consent, for example, contained a proviso that the impost would not go into effect unless all of the other states concurred, so Rhode Island’s refusal meant that Maryland was out, too.
The failure of the 1781 impost was the beginning of what would become the economic chaos of the 1780s. The states were imposing taxes on imports from the other states to protect their own economic interests, and once trade was restored with Britain, the states were levying their own import duties on goods coming from Britain both as a protective measure against the flood of imported goods coming into the country, which were cheaper than domestically manufactured goods, and also to pay off their own states’ war debts. When Connecticut and Massachusetts doubled their import duties on British goods and Rhode Island tripled theirs, British merchants simply started coming into ports in the other states and distributing their goods from those states. The Continental Congress was powerless to do anything about any of this because, under the Articles of Confederation, it had no power to regulate interstate commerce.
The devaluation of the paper money that had been issued by both the Continental Congress and the individual states, which eventually got to the point of barely being worth the paper it was printed on, led to inflation and widespread foreclosures on property because farmers couldn’t pay their property taxes.
America had won the war, but was an economic mess, and it was because the country was such a mess that people began to see the need for a stronger federal government that had powers beyond those that had been granted to the Continental Congress under the Articles of Confederation. And this, of course, brings us up to the Constitutional Convention – and Barton’s completely bogus claim that the Convention was boycotted by Rhode Island because the Baptists were afraid that a strong federal government might infringe upon their religious freedom.
Religion was the furthest thing from the minds of the members of the Rhode Island legislature when they refused to send delegates to the Convention. Rhode Island had become a state run by criminals, and its legislature wanted to keep it that way. In addition to this corrupt legislature’s enacting laws that were a deliberate scam to allow debtors to legally pay off their debts with money that was virtually worthless, this state founded as a haven for religious dissenters had become a haven for smugglers and other criminals. Rhode Island was so corrupt, and so reviled by the other states, that it was nicknamed “Rogues’ Island.” It had actually become a national joke that if you were trying to find someone who was wanted by the law, the place to start was Rhode Island.
The following quotes, from the letters of some of the most prominent founders during and in the months leading up to the Constitutional Convention, show what people in other states thought of Rhode Island.
Francis Hopkinson to Thomas Jefferson:
Rhode Island is at present govern’d by Miscreants void of even the external appearances of Honour or Justice.1
Edward Carrington to Thomas Jefferson:
All the States have elected representatives except Rhode Island, whose apostasy from every moral, as well as political, obligation, has placed her perfectly without the views of her confederates ...2
James Madison to Colonel James Madison:
Rhode Island alone has refused her concurrence. A majority of more than twenty in the Legislature of that State has refused to follow the general example. Being conscious of the wickedness of the measures they are pursuing, they are afraid of everything that may become a controul on them.3
James Madison to Edmund Randolph:
Rhode Island has negatived a motion for appointing deputies to the Convention, by a majority of twenty-two votes. Nothing can exceed the wickedness and folly which continue to reign there. All sense of character as well as of right is obliterated. Paper-money is still their idol, though it is debased to eight for one.4
George Washington to David Stuart:
Rhode Island, from our last accts still perservere in that impolitic – unjust – and one might add without impropriety scandalous conduct, which seems to have marked all her public Councils of late; – Consequently, no Representation is yet here from thence.5
The newspapers in the other states were also full of Rhode Island bashing. The following item from a Philadelphia newspaper, quoting a letter printed in a Massachusetts newspaper, was typical of what was seen in papers throughout the states once people found out that Rhode Island hadn’t sent any delegates to the Constitutional Convention:
Rhode-Island seems to have run the gauntlet of contempt through all the states; her conduct has been severely reprobated, and the most reproachful epithets bestowed on her, even by her neighbours of Massachusetts – ‘From her anti-federal disposition,’ say they, ‘Nothing better could have been expected. To that state it is owing, that the continental impost did not take place. To her may be charged the poverty of the soldiers of the late army, the heavy taxes of our citizens, and the embarrassed state of the public finances. It is, however, sincerely hoped and wished, that her dissent will never more be permitted to defeat any federal measure. Rather let her be dropped out of the union, or apportioned to the different states that surround her. Nor will the American constellation lose one gem thereby. – The state of Vermont shines with far superior lustre, and would more than compensate for the loss.6
The mentions of paper money and “wickedness of the measures” of Rhode Island’s legislature in the preceding quotes from the letters of the founders were all references to the same thing – the scam perpetrated by the Rhode Island legislature through a series of laws passed in 1786 to allow debtors to legally pay off their debts with paper money that was virtually worthless.
While other states had their share of problems because of the economic crisis – most famously Shays’ Rebellion in Massachusetts, where the raising of property taxes to pay the state’s war debt had led to an armed uprising by farmers who were losing their farms because they couldn’t pay their taxes – Rhode Island went completely off the rails.
Members of Rhode Island’s legislature who, in 1785, had opposed the printing of what they knew would be nearly worthless paper money as a solution to the debt crisis were voted out of office and replaced by a group of men who were debtors themselves and wanted an easy way out of their own debts. These new members of the legislature formed a majority that in May 1786 proceeded to approve their paper money scam. They would print a hundred thousand pounds in paper money and get this new money into circulation by offering loans to desperate farmers, at four percent interest, on a mortgage of their land, with the mortgage being twice what the land was worth. Knowing that this new money would depreciate almost instantly, the law they passed when issuing this money required that it must be accepted by all creditors and merchants at face value. As one opponent of the scheme described it:
Notwithstanding the specious pretences under which this bill has been introduced, as if it was intended thereby to RELIEVE THE DISTRESSED, we conceive it to be calculated only to accommodate certain persons, who being deeply in debt for real estates and other property, purchased under contracts to be paid for in solid coin, and who have now promoted this measure to serve their own private purposes.7
When the farmers who had mortgaged their land for the loans from the legislature tried to spend the new paper money, they quickly found out how little it was really worth. Because of the law’s requirement that they had to accept this money at its face value despite its almost instant depreciation, the merchants in the cities had drastically raised their prices. Although the merchants had actually been opposed to the printing of this money, the farmers blamed them for the outrageous prices. In the summer of 1786, most of the merchants just closed up shop. In retaliation, the farmers decided to starve the merchants, refusing to send any food from their farms to the cities, which led to farmers being threatened by armed city dwellers. Within months of the legislature’s issuing the new paper money, there was chaos on the streets of Rhode Island’s cities, where one of the only types of businesses that had remained open was the bars.
All over the state, creditors were doing anything they could to evade the people who owed them money. The creditors did not want to accept the devalued paper money, but if a debtor caught up to them and offered this money to them they had to accept it. But the legislature, which had obviously anticipated that this would happen, had provided for an alternate way to force the creditors to take the money. All a debtor had to do was go to any judge’s house and deposit the money with the judge. The judge was then required to publish a notice in all the newspapers in the state for three consecutive weeks informing the creditor that the debtor had deposited the money with them and that their debt was considered paid in full. The judges became known as “Know Ye men” from the notices that filled the newspapers, which were all published using the fill-in-the-blanks language prescribed by the legislature that began with the words “Know Ye.”
State of Rhode-Island, &c.
TO ALL WHOM IT MAY CONCERN.
KNOW YE, That Joseph Smith, of Barrington, Merchant, on the 12th Day of March, 1787, at my Dwelling-House at Barrington, lodged with me the Sum of One Hundred and Seventy-five Pounds Five Shillings, Lawful Money, being in full of the Principal and Interest of a Sum of Money, due from the said Joseph Smith to John Brown, of Providence, Esq; on a Note of Hand: that the said Joseph Smith hath in all Respects complied with the Law Respecting the Paper Currency; and that the said John Brown hath been legally and duly notified thereof.
Witness, Elkanah Humphrey, J.C.P.
Barrington, March 30, 1787.8
A second law that had gone into effect in June 1786 imposed a heavy fine on anyone who refused to accept the paper money at its face value. (Ironically, this fine could actually be paid with the funny money.) And another law, passed in August 1786, added a further punishment, making compliance with the earlier law a test for political eligibility by barring anyone who committed a second offense from holding political office or being an elector.
The August 1786 law also did something else – it deprived those accused of refusing to accept the paper money of a trial by jury. The legislature created a new kind of court for paper money cases. These courts were required to convene three days after a complaint was made just to hear that case, and had no jury. The cases were to be decided by the judges alone.
In September 1786, a cabinetmaker named John Trevett decided to take his case to one of these paper money courts. Trevett had attempted to buy some meat from a butcher named John Weeden and pay for it with the paper money. Weeden refused to accept the money. But Weeden was acquitted because the judges decided that the act of the legislature that had created this special court was unconstitutional because it did not provide for a trial by jury. And what happened to these judges who had dared to rule this act of their state’s corrupt legislature unconstitutional? They were summoned to appear before the legislature to explain their conduct, and although not removed from the bench immediately, were replaced when their terms were up the following spring.
This case made national news, and was even brought up by James Madison at the Constitutional Convention in a debate on whether or not the federal government should be able to nullify a state law if it violated the federal Constitution or a treaty made by the federal government. Some of the delegates at the Convention had not thought it necessary to explicitly state this, with Roger Sherman arguing that “the Courts of the States would not consider as valid any law contravening the Authority of the Union.”9 Madison disagreed, using Rhode Island as one of his examples, saying: “In R. Island the Judges who refused to execute an unconstitutional law were displaced, and others substituted, by the Legislature who would be willing instruments of the wicked & arbitrary plans of their masters.”10
The following poem is an excerpt from The Anarchiad, an epic satirical political poem written by the “Hartford Wits,”11 published in installments in the New-Haven Gazette and Connecticut Magazine during 1786 and 1787. In the months following its publication in the December 28, 1786, issue of the New-Haven Gazette, this excerpt about Rhode Island was reprinted in all the states, including Rhode Island, where it was published in the Providence Gazette – on the very same page on which ten “Know Ye” notices appeared:
Hail, realm of rogues, renown’d for fraud and guile,
All hail, ye knav’ries of yon little isle;
There prowls the rascal cloth’d with legal power,
To snare the orphan, and the poor devour;
The crafty knave his creditor besets,
And advertising paper pays his debts;
Bankrupts their creditors with rage pursue.
No stop – no mercy from the debtor crew.
Arm’d with new tests, the licens’d villain bold
Presents his bills and robs them of their gold;
Their ears though rogues and counterfeiters lose,
No legal robber fears the gallows-noose.
“Look through the State, th’ unhallow’d ground appears
A den of dragons, and a cave for bears;
A nest of vipers mix’d with adders foul,
The screaching night-bird, and the greater owl:
For now unrighteousness, a deluge wide,
Pours round the land an overwhelming tide;
And dark injustice, wrapped in paper sheets,
Rolls a dread torrent thro’ the wasted streets.
While net of law the unwary fry draw in
To damning deeds, and scarce they know they sin:
New paper struck, new tests, new tenders made,
Insult mankind, and help the thriving trade.
Each weekly print new list of cheats proclaims,
Proud to enroll their knav’ries and their names;
The wiser race, the snares of law to shun,
Like Lot from Sodom, from R--- I--- run.12
Now, knowing the real story of why Rhode Island’s legislature refused to send delegates to the Constitutional Convention, let’s go back and look at David Barton’s claim from The Jefferson Lies again:
... from the early settlement of Rhode Island in the 1630s to the time of the writing of the federal Constitution in 1787, the Baptists had often found their free exercise limited by state-established government power. Baptist ministers had often been beaten, imprisoned, and even faced death from the government church, so it was not surprising that they strongly opposed centralized government power. For this reason the predominantly Baptist state of Rhode Island refused to send delegates to the Constitutional Convention ...
Now, Barton, who claims to document everything, must have an endnote in his book so that everybody can see his evidence for his claim that Rhode Island didn’t send delegates to the Constitutional Convention out of fear of religious persecution, right? Well, yes, he has an endnote, and that endnote lists three sources. It lists Elliot’s Debates on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, an 1854 book by Benson J. Lossing, and a link on the National Archives website. And what do you find when you actually look up these sources that Barton cites? Three sources showing nothing but that there were no delegates from Rhode Island at the Constitutional Convention. All that’s on the pages of Elliot’s Debates that Barton cites is the end of the Constitution itself, showing the signers were by state. The pages in the Benson J. Lossing book are just a list of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention. And, the page on National Archives website? That’s just a list of links to the biographies of the delegates by state, with a note under Rhode Island that says “Rhode Island did not send any delegates to the Constitutional Convention.” So, Barton has proven beyond a shadow of an nonexisting doubt that Rhode Island did not send any delegates to the Constitutional Convention. What he hasn’t provided any evidence for, of course, is his completely fabricated claim that the reason for Rhode Island’s absence from the Convention was a fear that a stong central government might persecute Baptists.
So, what about the other part of Barton’s Baptist claim?
... the Baptists were the only denomination in which a majority of its clergy across the nation voted against ratification of the Constitution.
Barton attributes this also to a fear among the Baptists that their free exercise of religion might be hampered by a strong federal government. Well, no surprise, this claim isn’t true either. It is true that a majority (eight out of thirteen) Baptist ministers who were delegates to their states’ ratifying conventions voted against ratification, but their reasons had nothing whatsoever to do with a fear that a federal government might infringe on their free exercise of religion. The reasons that these Baptist minister delegates voted against ratification were primarily geographical, just like the numerous non-minister delegates who voted against ratification.
Barton’s source for this claim is his fellow revisionist historian, John Eidsmoe. In his book Christianity and the Constitution, Eidsmoe misrepresents what religious historian James H. Smylie wrote in his 1958 doctoral dissertation, “American Clergymen and the Constitution of the United States of America, 1780-1796.” Eidsmoe presents two charts from Smylie’s dissertation,13 but omits a third one – the one that would make his claims seem obviously questionable to his readers.
The first of the two charts included by Eidsmoe shows the total number of all clergymen in each state (regardless of denomination), and how many voted for and how many against ratification. The second chart shows the number of clergymen by denomination (regardless of state), and how many voted for and how many against ratification.
What does Eidsmoe omit? The chart in Smylie’s dissertation that shows how many clergymen of each denomination were in each state. With even just a quick glance at this other chart, one thing immediately jumps out – of the total of thirteen Baptist clergymen in all the states, six were in a single state, North Carolina, and five of those six voted against ratification.14 So, the Baptists from just this one single state accounted for five out of the eight of all Baptist votes against ratification. And Smylie even gives an explanation for this voting pattern among the Baptist ministers in North Carolina. They voted just like the delegates in their state who weren’t ministers, with the ones who represented the anti-federalist-leaning rural districts typically voting against ratification, and the ones who represented the federalist-leaning commercial districts typically voting for ratification.15 Of the six Baptist ministers at North Carolina’s ratifying convention, five represented rural districts and voted against ratification and the one who represented a commercial district voted for it. It had nothing to do with their religion or a fear that a strong federal government might infringe upon their religious freedom.
Smylie also points out that “the oldest and most conservative of the Baptists, calling themselves the Philadelphia Association” sent a message to all of the churches in their association in support of ratification, urging the people of those congregations to “lay hold on this favourable opportunity offered to establish an efficient government, which, we hope, may, under God, secure our invaluable rights, both civil and religious.”16 It certainly doesn’t sound like these Baptists, who were in the central states, were afraid that a strong federal government was going to infringe on their religious freedom, does it?
But what about in the states known for their persecution of Baptists? Well, Smylie addresses one of those states on the next page of his dissertation, quoting the statement of the General Committee of Baptists in Virginia. The Baptists in Virginia weren’t quite as favorable towards the Constitution as the Baptists in the central states, but their reason was that they didn’t think the Constitution had “made sufficient provisions for the secure enjoyment of religious liberty.”17 In other words, the Baptists of Virginia, who had faced some of the worst persecution of any Baptists in America, wanted a religious freedom amendment because it would protect their religious freedom. This is, of course, the exact opposite of what the revisionists claim about the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut. Doesn’t make much sense, does it? That of two organizations of Baptists, both in states where Baptists had faced persecution by their governments, one would be afraid of a religious freedom amendment in the federal Constitution while the other wanted a religious freedom amendment in the federal Constitution? Of course it doesn’t make sense – because the revisionists’ claim about the Danbury Baptists is completely untrue. As said at the beginning of this chapter, it is a claim made up for the sole purpose of being able to change the meaning of Jefferson’s reply to the Danbury Baptists. In order to change the meaning of Jefferson’s reply, they need to change the reason the Danbury Baptists wrote to him. Once their followers believe that the reason the Baptists wrote to Jefferson was a fear that the First Amendment, by granting religious freedom also had the power to take away religious freedom, they can claim that Jefferson’s “wall of separation between church and state” in his reply to them was nothing more than a reassurance that the federal government would never interfere with their free exercise of religion.
While his lies about Rhode Island’s reason for not attending the Constitutional Convention and the Baptist delegates voting against ratification of the Constitution are new additions, Barton’s lie in The Jefferson Lies about why the Danbury Baptists wrote to Jefferson is the same as in his other books and the books of his fellow revisionists. Referring to the letter from the Danbury Baptists to Jefferson, he writes:
Their letter began with an expression of gratitude to God for Jefferson’s election followed by prayers of blessing for him. They then expressed grave concern over the proposed government protections for their free exercise. As they explained:
“Our sentiments are uniformly on the side of religious liberty – that religion is at all times and places a matter between God and individuals; that no man ought to suffer in name, person, or effects on account of his religious opinions; that the legitimate power of civil government extends no further than to punish the man who works ill to his neighbors; But, sir, our constitution of government is not specific. ... Religion is considered as the first object of legislation; and therefore what religious privileges we enjoy (as a minor part of the state) we enjoy as favors granted, and not as inalienable rights.”
These ministers were troubled that their “religious privileges” were being guaranteed by the apparent generosity of the government.
Many citizens today do not grasp their concern. Why would ministers object to the State guaranteeing their enjoyment of religious privileges? Because to the far-sighted Danbury Baptists, the mere presence of governmental language protecting their free exercise of religion suggested that it had become a government-granted right (and thus alienable) rather than a God-given one (and hence inalienable). Fearing that the inclusion of such language in governing documents might someday cause the government wrongly to believe that since it had “granted” the freedom of religious expression it therefore had the authority to regulate it, the Danbury Baptists had strenuously objected.
There are so many things wrong with these few paragraphs that it’s hard to know where to begin.
First of all, why is Barton saying that the Baptists were afraid of “the proposed government protections for their free exercise”? The First Amendment was not “proposed” in 1801 when the Baptists wrote to Jefferson. It had been ratified a decade earlier in 1791.
Second, the Baptists had no fear of the First Amendment. They hadn’t objected to it at all, let alone “strenuously objected” to it. They weren’t even talking about the federal government or the federal Constitution in their letter to Jefferson, and they also weren’t talking about “someday.” They were talking about the current laws of their state government.
What Barton does to hide from his readers what the Baptists were really writing to Jefferson about is to simply edit out the parts of their letter that indicate that they were talking about their state government and not the federal government.
This is the section of the Danbury Baptists’ letter quoted by Barton, with the parts he edits out in bold:
Our Sentiments are uniformly on the side of Religious Liberty – That Religion is at all times and places a Matter between God and Individuals – That no man aught to suffer in Name, person or effects on account of his religious Opinions – That the legitimate Power of civil Goverment extends no further than to punish the man who works ill to his neighbour: But Sir, our constitution of goverment is not specific. Our antient charter, together with the Laws made coincident therewith, were adopted as the Basis of our goverment, At the time of our revolution; and such had been our Laws & usages, & such still are; that religion is consider’d as the first object of Legislation; & therefore what religious privileges we enjoy (as a minor part of the State) we enjoy as favors granted, and not as inalienable rights: and these favors we receive at the expence of such degrading acknowledgements as are inconsistant with the rights of freemen.18
In 1801, when the Danbury Baptists wrote to Jefferson, the state of Connecticut was still a theocracy – a Congregationalist theocracy under which dissenters, such as Baptists, were discriminated against and persecuted. And that brings us to another little trick commonly used by the revisionists when they’re talking about anything to do with religious persecution in colonial America and the early years of the state governments. If they give a specific example of a state religion under which religious dissenters were persecuted in America, they always use the Church of England as their example.
Look again, for example, at the version of the Danbury Baptist story from William Federer’s book:
Jefferson wrote a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association of Danbury, Connecticut, calming their fears that Congress was not in the process of choosing any one single Christian denomination to be the “state” denomination, as was the case with the Anglican Church in England and Virginia.
Now, why, when Federer is writing about the persecuted Baptists in Connecticut, is he using the Church of England in Virginia as his example of Baptist persecution? Why doesn’t he use the much more relevant Congregationalist state church establishment in Connecticut – the church that was actually persecuting the Baptists he’s writing about – as his example? Well, because the revisionists don’t want their readers to understand that the Puritans who came to America to flee religious persecution in England turned around once here and became the persecutors of any dissenters from their beliefs. Why? Because they constantly cite all the biblically-based laws of the theocratic New England states as part of their evidence that America was founded as a Christian nation. You can see how letting on that the very same Christians who were enacting all of those biblically-based laws were the people who were persecuting religious dissenters like the Baptists might pose a bit of a problem, right? So, the revisionists simply blame religious persecution in America on the Church of England, banking on their audience’s not knowing enough about early American history to understand that it was only in the southern colonies that the Church of England was the established church, and that in New England it was the colonists who came to America to escape religious persecution who became the persecutors of their fellow Americans, instituting their own all-American theocracy – the Congregationalist theocracy that still existed in Connecticut when the Danbury Baptists wrote to Thomas Jefferson in 1801.
Before getting any further into the Danbury Baptists’ letter, we need to digress one more time to take a look at some other lies that David Barton uses in The Jefferson Lies in his build up to his lies about the Baptists’ letter and Jefferson’s reply.
Barton needs to make the phrase “separation between church and state” not to have really come from Jefferson, but to be a phrase that was merely borrowed by Jefferson from some religious leader. Why is this important? Because having the phrase come from a religious leader makes the revisionist claim that Jefferson only intended his wall to mean a one-way wall, keeping the government out of the church but not the church out of the government, seem more plausible. Usually, the religious leader from whom Jefferson is said to have borrowed the phrase is Roger Williams, who founded the Providence Plantation colony in Rhode Island as a haven for religious dissenters. In The Jefferson Lies, however, Barton adds another, much earlier religious source for the phrase “separation between church and state,” writing:
It is important to note that it was not secular civil leaders who emphasized the separation of the Church from the control of the State but rather Bible-based ministers. In fact, it was English Reformation clergyman Reverend Richard Hooker who first used the phrase during the reign of England’s King Henry VIII, calling for a “separation of … Church and Commonwealth.” (Recall that Henry wanted a divorce, but when the Church refused to give it, he simply started his own national church – the Anglican Church – and gave himself the divorce under his new state-established doctrines.)
What we have here is one of the many anachronisms used by Barton in The Jefferson Lies. Barton’s claim that Richard Hooker used any phrase during the reign of Henry VIII is impossible. Henry VIII was king of England from 1509 to 1547. Richard Hooker wasn’t even born until 1554. So, unless Richard Hooker was calling for a separation of Church and Commonwealth seven years before he was born, Barton’s claim can’t possibly be true.
But what about the Richard Hooker quote itself? Did Hooker really call for a “separation of … Church and Commonwealth” as Barton claims? Well, no. Barton is misquoting a sentence from Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, written between 1594 and 1597 to argue against the Puritans who sought to reform the Church of England. In this work, Hooker argued at length against each of the assertions made by the Puritans about what was wrong with the Church. The specific sentence that Barton uses to create his misquote comes from Hooker’s argument against the position of the Puritans that no person should hold both a civil and an ecclesiastical office at the same time. In the sentence that Barton butchers to concoct his claim that Hooker called for a “separation of … Church and Commonwealth,” Hooker was merely using these words to describe what the Puritans were calling for, and what he was arguing against:
And there are which do imagine, that Kings being mere lay-persons, do by this means exceed the lawful bounds of their callings; Which thing to the end that they may persuade, they first make a necessary separation perpetual and personal between the Church and the commonwealth.19
So, no, contrary to Barton’s claim, Richard Hooker did not call for a “separation of...Church and Commonwealth,” either during the reign of Henry VIII or later in life when he defended the Church of England against the position of the Puritans.
After his anachronistic Richard Hooker misquote, Barton continues:
Other Bible-centered ministers also spoke out against the intrusion of the State into the jurisdiction of the Church, including the Rev. John Greenwood (1556-1593) who started the church attended by many of the Pilgrims when they lived in England.
Barton goes on to explain that, under Queen Elizabeth I, John Greenwood was executed for “denying her Majesty’s ecclesiastical supremacy and attacking the existing ecclesiastical order,” and then continues:
Then, when Parliament passed a law requiring that if “any of her Majesty’s subjects to deny the Queen’s ecclesiastical supremacy ... they shall be committed to prison without bail,” most of the Pilgrims fled from England to Holland. From Holland they went to America where they boldly advocated separation of church and state, affirming that government had no right to “compel religion, to plant churches by power, and to force a submission to ecclesiastical government by laws and penalties.”
Yes, you read that right – Barton is actually claiming that the Pilgrims “boldly advocated separation of church and state” when they got to America. But, before getting to that outrageous claim, we need to put Barton’s mish-mash of quotes and events that he connects to “the Pilgrims” into some kind of chronological order.
First of all, unless the Pilgrims were traveling a hundred and fifty miles to go to church, Barton is telling another fib. Greenwood’s congregation was in London. The congregation that became the Pilgrims came from the vicinity of the town of Scrooby, about a hundred and fifty miles north of London. And the Pilgrims’ congregation wasn’t even formed until 1606, twenty years after John Greenwood’s congregation was active. Of the forty or so Separatists known as the Pilgrims who were among the one hundred and two people on the Mayflower, only three were old enough to have been adults when John Greenwood’s church was active nearly thirty-five years earlier in the 1580s.
Then there’s the law of Parliament that Barton quotes. That’s from 1593, also too early to have been what prompted the Pilgrims to flee England for Holland, since their congregation wasn’t even formed until 1606, and they didn’t flee to Holland until 1608.
And finally, there’s Barton’s quote from “the Pilgrims.” That quote does not come from the Pilgrims. It’s from A Treatise of Reformation without tarrying for any, and of the wickedness of those preachers who will not reform them and their charge, because they will tarry till the magistrate command and compel them, written by Robert Browne in 1582. This treatise was an attack by Browne on the Puritan clergy, who were waiting around, or “tarrying,” for the Queen and Parliament to reform the Church of England instead of just going ahead and trying to reform their own individual congregations. The Puritans did not want to separate from the Church of England, but merely sought to reform, or purify, the existing Church. Separatists, on the other hand, saw the Church of England as beyond reform and wanted to completely separate from it and form independent, self-governing local churches, the basis of Congregationalism. Browne was a Separatist, as were the Pilgrims, and, like many other Separatists, he did go from England to Holland, but any connection between Browne and the Pilgrims who came to America ends there. While Browne is unquestionably an extremely important figure in the history of Congregationalism – sometimes called the father of Congregationalism since he was the first to lay out in writing the principles of Congregationalism – he was not one of the Pilgrims. Browne was kicked out of his own congregation in Holland in 1583 – nearly four decades before the Pilgrims came to America – and, after a failed attempt to keep his movement going in Scotland, returned to England, eventually agreeing to conform to the Church of England.
And, besides the fact that the quote used by Barton didn’t come from any of the Pilgrims, even Robert Browne didn’t mean what Barton implies was meant by this quote. Browne and the other early Separatist leaders did not advocate anything like what we would think of as a separation between church and state. They did not assert that a monarch didn’t have a right to make and enforce what they described as “outward” religious laws. In fact, in the same treatise, Browne said that the Queen and her magistrates did have the authority to “reforme the Church and commande things expedient for the same,”20 and that the Queen had the right to “put to death all that deserve it by Lawe, either of the Church or Common wealth.”21
So, why does Barton use a 1582 quote from Robert Browne instead of a real quote from the Pilgrims to support his claim that the Pilgrims who came to America “boldly advocated separation of church and state” and didn’t think the government had the right to “compel religion, to plant churches by power, and to force a submission to ecclesiastical government by laws and penalties?” Well, probably because a quote like that might be a bit hard to come by since the Pilgrims, along with the Puritans who followed a decade later and founded the Massachusetts Bay colony, did compel religion and force a submission to ecclesiastical government by laws and penalties. The only difference was that it was their ecclesiastical government.
Incredibly, Barton immediately follows his ridiculous claim that the Pilgrims “boldly advocated separation of church and state” by using Roger Williams as an example of “other” ministers and colonists who advocated the separation of church and state, writing:
Many other Reformation-minded ministers and colonists traveling from Europe to America also openly advocated the institutional separation of State and Church, including the Reverends Roger Williams (1603-1683), John Wise (1652-1725), William Penn (1614-1718), and many others.
Yes, Barton is actually using Roger Williams, a minister convicted of sedition and heresy and banished by the General Court – the civil government of the Massachusetts Bay colony – as an example in the same part of his book where he is deceptively giving his readers the impression that the early colonists in Massachusetts advocated a “one-way wall” version of separation of church and state in which the civil government didn’t interfere in religious matters. But what was one of the big reasons that Williams was banished by the civil government? His speaking out against the enforcement of religious laws by the civil government!
Now, so far in Barton’s convoluted and historically fictitious build-up to the Danbury Baptists’ 1801 letter to Thomas Jefferson, we’ve been to England and Rhode Island and Massachusetts. But here is where we can finally make an actual historical connection to Connecticut.
In 1635, the same year the General Court banished Roger Williams,
one of the members of this civil government was Roger Ludlow, the deputy governor when Williams was summoned to appear before the General Court in March 1635. Ludlow was gone by the time that the Court actually banished Williams, having decided after losing the 1635 election for governor to join the migration to Connecticut, where, against the wishes of the General Court, new settlements were being established. In 1639, Ludlow would purchase land from the Pequonnock Indians and establish the plantation that eventually became Fairfield, Connecticut, but there’s something more important that he did just before that. He wrote Connecticut’s “Fundamental Orders,” considered to be Connecticut’s first constitution.
In 1801, when the Danbury Baptists wrote to Jefferson, the state of Connecticut was still a theocracy. Its state “constitution” was still its Fundamental Orders of 1638-1639 and its Charter of 1662.
So, let’s go back to the two parts of the Danbury Baptists’ letter that David Barton omits when quoting the letter in The Jefferson Lies. This is how the letter is quoted by Barton:
Our sentiments are uniformly on the side of religious liberty – that religion is at all times and places a matter between God and Individuals; that no man ought to suffer in name, person or effects on account of his religious opinions; that the legitimate power of civil goverment extends no further than to punish the man who works ill to his neighbor. But sir, our constitution of goverment is not specific. ... Religion is considered as the first object of legislation and therefore what religious privileges we enjoy (as a minor part of the State) we enjoy as favors granted, and not as inalienable rights.
Now, reading this as quoted by Barton, it sounds like it could be referring to the federal government and the federal Constitution, right? And that’s because this is exactly what Barton wants his readers to think the Baptists were referring to. That makes it fit the lie that the Baptists were afraid that the First Amendment, by mentioning religion at all, opened the door for the federal government to interfere with religion.
What Barton has deleted are the two parts that, even to someone who didn’t know exactly what they were referring to, would indicate that the Baptists weren’t talking about the federal Constitution.
Here, again, is the section of the letter, with the parts deleted by Barton restored:
Our Sentiments are uniformly on the side of Religious Liberty – That Religion is at all times and places a Matter between God and Individuals – That no man aught to suffer in Name, person or effects on account of his religious Opinions – That the legitimate Power of civil Goverment extends no further than to punish the man who works ill to his neighbour: But Sir, our constitution of goverment is not specific. Our antient charter, together with the Laws made coincident therewith, were adopted as the Basis of our goverment, At the time of our revolution; and such had been our Laws & usages, & such still are; that religion is consider’d as the first object of Legislation; & therefore what religious privileges we enjoy (as a minor part of the State) we enjoy as favors granted, and not as inalienable rights: and these favors we receive at the expence of such degrading acknowledgements as are inconsistant with the rights of freemen.
Obviously, in order to make his readers think the Baptists were talking about the federal Constitution, Barton needs to delete that stuff about an “antient charter.” Even Barton’s readers might wonder why anyone in 1801 would be calling the Constitution an “antient charter.” And most of Barton’s readers would probably know that the Constitution was written a bit after the Revolutionary War, so that stuff about the government being adopted “at the time of our revolution” might sound a bit strange, too. And that last bit about the “degrading acknowledgements” wouldn’t make any sense if they were talking about the federal government. So, Barton just gets rid of all of this, leaving a version that will sound to his readers like the Baptists were talking about the federal Constitution and that “grave concern over the proposed government protections for their free exercise” that Barton says these Baptists were writing to Jefferson about.
As already explained, what the Baptists meant by their “antient charter” and that their “constitution of goverment is not specific” was that Connecticut’s state “constitution” was still its Fundamental Orders written by Roger Ludlow in 1638 and adopted in 1639, and its Charter of 1662. Although this charter had almost no effect on Connecticut’s existing government, it is considered by some to be the state’s second constitution. The reason for the charter was that when Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, Connecticut’s General Court became concerned that their colony had never been granted an official charter. So, a charter was quickly drafted, and the colony’s governor, John Winthrop, Jr., sailed to England with it. The charter was approved, and it was officially adopted by Connecticut in 1662.
What the Baptists were referring to when they wrote that “the Laws made coincident therewith” the charter “were adopted as the Basis of our goverment, At the time of our revolution; and such had been our Laws & usages, & such still are; that religion is consider’d as the first object of Legislation” was that, unlike almost all of the other states, Connecticut had not written a state constitution or adopted a new government during the Revolutionary War. Since Connecticut had a government that would not be affected by the separation from England, its General Assembly had simply declared in an act of 1776 that the state would remain under its existing government:
That the ancient form of Civil Government contained in the Charter from Charles the Second, King of England, and adopted by the people of this state, shall be and remain the Civil Constitution of this State, under the sole authority of the People hereof, independent of any King or Prince whatever.22
So, Connecticut remained a Congregationalist theocracy in which religion was, as the Baptists wrote, “the first object of Legislation,” and under which dissenters like the Baptists were persecuted.
The “degrading acknowledgements” that the Baptists wrote about were the certificates required to exempt those of dissenting religions from paying taxes to support the Congregationalist Church. By 1801, when the Baptists wrote to Jefferson, Connecticut did allow non-Congregationalists of certain government approved denominations to have their religious taxes go to their own churches, but the process of obtaining and filing the necessary exemption certificate was made as difficult and demeaning as possible.
Barton, of course, cuts off the end of this sentence so that his readers don’t see the part about the “degrading acknowledgements.” Barton only wants them to see the part where the Baptists said “what religious privileges we enjoy (as a minor part of the State) we enjoy as favors granted,” allowing him to tell his lie that the Baptists were expressing a fear of the First Amendment, writing:
Many citizens today do not grasp their concern. Why would ministers object to the State guaranteeing their enjoyment of religious privileges? Because to the far-sighted Danbury Baptists, the mere presence of governmental language protecting their free exercise of religion suggested that it had become a government-granted right (and thus alienable) rather than a God-given one (and hence inalienable). Fearing that the inclusion of such language in governing documents might someday cause the government wrongly to believe that since it had “granted” the freedom of religious expression it therefore had the authority to regulate it, the Danbury Baptists had strenuously objected.
And then, with his readers thinking that the Baptists were afraid of the First Amendment, Barton can claim of Jefferson’s reply:
Understanding this, Jefferson replied to them on January 1, 1802, reassuring them that they had nothing to fear: the government would not meddle with their religious expressions.
Now, obviously, Jefferson was not reassuring the Baptists that they had nothing to fear from the federal government because they weren’t afraid of the federal government. But the Christian nationalists have to find some way to make Jefferson’s “wall of separation between church and state” metaphor mean something other than what Jefferson meant by it, so they do what they do best – they lie. They lie about what the Danbury Baptists were writing to Jefferson about so that they can lie about what he meant by his reply.
Jefferson’s meaning was clear. The First Amendment had built a “wall of separation between Church & State” in the federal government, and he wanted to see that same wall everywhere:
Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & 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 & State. adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.23
It would take another sixteen years, but Jefferson did eventually “see with sincere satisfaction” the disestablishment of Connecticut’s Congregationalist theocracy. In the state’s 1817 election, the Republican candidates for governor and lieutenant governor narrowly defeated the Federalists. In the next election, the Federalists lost their majority in the state’s Assembly. And in August and September of 1818, Connecticut was finally able to hold a constitutional convention and write a real state constitution, complete with a Declaration of Rights that included the “exercise and enjoyment of religious profession and worship, without discrimination.”
Upon hearing of the Republican victory in the 1817 Connecticut election, Jefferson wrote to John Adams:
I join you therefore in sincere congratulations that this den of the priesthood is at length broken up, and that a protestant popedom is no longer to disgrace the American history and character.24
1. Francis Hopkinson to Thomas Jefferson, July 8, 1787. Julian Boyd, ed., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 11, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1955), 561.
2. Edward Carrington to Thomas Jefferson, June 9, 1787. Ibid., 407.
3. James Madison to Colonel James Madison, April 1, 1787. Letters and Other Writings of James Madison, vol. 1, (New York: R. Worthington, 1884), 286.
4. James Madison to Edmund Randolph, April 2, 1787. Henry D. Gilpin, ed., Debates in the Congress of the Confederation, from February 19, 1787 to April 25, 1787, vol. 2, (Washington, D.C.: Langtree & O’Sullivan, 1840), 630.
5. George Washington to David Stuart, July 14, 1787. Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, vol. 3, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1911), 51.
6. The Pennsylvania Packet, Philadelphia, PA, July 17, 1787, 2.
The state of Vermont, referenced in the last sentence of this article, was not yet a state in 1787, but was expected to become one soon. Vermont had separated from Great Britain in 1777, written its own constitution, and fought in the Revolutionary War, but was still a separate republic, primarily due to an unresolved border dispute with New York. Once the federal Constitution was ratified and the border dispute with New York resolved, Vermont was admitted to the Union according to the process laid out in the Constitution, becoming the 14th state in 1791.
7. Providence Gazette, Providence, RI, May 13, 1786, 3.
8. Ibid., April 14, 1787, 4.
9. Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, vol. 2, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1911), 27.
10. Ibid., 28.
11. The “Hartford Wits” began as a literary society at Yale College in the 1770s, writing satires about subjects like the school’s outdated curriculum. Some of its members continued writing together long after leaving Yale. The Anarchiad was the work of four members of the Hartford Wits – Lemuel Hopkins, John Trumbull (cousin of the painter of the same name), Joel Barlow (whose name may be familiar to some as the author of the 1797 Treaty with Tripoli containing the often discussed line “the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion”), and David Humphreys (who at the time of the writing of The Anarchiad was a member of the Connecticut legislature, and later, as Commissioner Plenipotentiary in Lisbon, was the official who approved Barlow’s translation of the 1797 Treaty with Tripoli and submitted it for ratification).
12. Providence Gazette, Providence, RI, April 14, 1787, 4.
13. John Eidsmoe, Christianity and the Constitution, (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1987), 353.
14. James H. Smylie, “American Clergymen and the Constitution of the United States of America, 1780-1796,” Th.D. dissertation, Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, NJ, 1954, 179.
15. Ibid., 183.
16. Ibid., 169.
17. Ibid., 170.
18. The Danbury Baptist Association to Thomas Jefferson, after October 7, 1801. Barbara B. Oberg, ed., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 35, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 407-408.
19. Richard Hooker, The Works of that Learned and Judicious Divine Mr. Richard Hooker, vol. 3, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1820), 286.
20. A Treatise of Reformation without Tarying for Anie, (London: Congregational Historical Society, 1903), 26.
21. Ibid., 18.
22. James Bradley Thayer, Cases on Constitutional Law, vol. 1, (Cambridge: Charles W. Sever, 1895), 433.
23. Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist Association, January 1, 1802. Barbara B. Oberg, ed., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 36, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 258.
24. Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, May 5, 1817. Albert Ellery Bergh, ed., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 15, (Washington D.C.: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1907), 109.
