Building the “Wall of Separation”: Construction Zone for Historians
The argument of Mark deWolfe Howe's The Garden and the Wilderness turned on the contrast Howe drew between two uses of a single phrase: “wall of separation.” Thomas Jefferson used the phrase in 1802, in a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association: “I contemplate with sovereign reverence that ac...
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
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| Published: |
Cambridge Univ. Press
2010
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| In: |
Church history
Year: 2010, Volume: 79, Issue: 4, Pages: 871-880 |
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| Summary: | The argument of Mark deWolfe Howe's The Garden and the Wilderness turned on the contrast Howe drew between two uses of a single phrase: “wall of separation.” Thomas Jefferson used the phrase in 1802, in a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association: “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.” More than a century and a half earlier, in 1644, the colonial advocate of religious freedom Roger Williams had employed the same phrase in a letter to his theological opponent, the Reverend John Cotton of Boston. According to Williams's reading of the Bible, the people of God—Jews and Christians—were “separate from the world,” and, “when they have opened a gap in the hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world, God hath ever broke down the wall itself, removed the candlestick, and made His garden a wilderness, as at this day. And that therefore if He will ever please to restore His garden and paradise again, it must of necessity be walled in peculiarly unto Himself from the world; and that all that shall be saved out of the world are to be transplanted out of the wilderness of the world, and added unto his church or garden.” |
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| ISSN: | 1755-2613 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Church history
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1017/S0009640710001071 |