Below The Beltway

In yet another segment of her interviews with Sarah Palin and Joe Biden, Katie Couric asks both Vice-Presidential candidates about their view of the seperation of church and state:

Here’s the transcript:

Katie Couric: Thomas Jefferson wrote about the First Amendment, building a wall of separation between church and state. Why do you think that’s so important?

Sarah Palin: His intention in expressing that was so that government did not mandate a religion on people. And Thomas Jefferson also said never underestimate the wisdom of the people. And the wisdom of the people, I think in this issue is that people have the right and the ability and the desire to express their own religious views, be it a very personal level, which is why I choose to express my faith, or in a more public forum.

And the wisdom of the people, thankfully, engrained in the foundation of our country, is so extremely important. And Thomas Jefferson wanted to protect that.

Biden: The best way to look at it is look the every state where the wall’s not built. Look at every country in the world where religion is able to impact … the governance. Almost every one of those countries are in real turmoil.

Look, the founders were pretty smart. They had gone through, you know, several hundred years of wars - religious wars. And they were in the midst of religious wars in Europe. And they figured it out: The best way to do this is to keep the government out of religion. They took religion out of government. But they didn’t mean religion couldn’t be in a public place, in the public square.

Palin’s statement is particularly interesting mostly because it ends up becoming a fundamental misreading of what Jefferson meant when he said that the First Amendment had erected a “wall of separation” between the political and clerical worlds — namely his assertion, widely accepted during the Founding Era, that true religious liberty required that the state and the church remain separate entities. Just as the state should not get involved in or seek to influence matters belonging to the religious world, the church should not get involved in or seek to influence matters that are the purview of civil government.

Palin, however, doesn’t see it that way. Like most social conservatives, she views Jefferson’s wall as strictly a one-way affair meant to protect the church from state interference. Such a view, however, ignores the historical reality of the world that Jefferson and the Founders lived in:

To really understand Jefferson’s reply, it’s important to know why the Connecticut Baptists wrote to him in the first place.

Baptists in Connecticut had been unhappy with their lot for a long time. Originally a type of mild Congregationalist theocracy, Connecticut had moved toward a different system of state-supported religion by the middle of the 18th century. Instead of a single established church, Connecticut allowed communities to vote on which church they wanted to support with tax funds. In practice, this meant subsidies for the Congregationalists, who wielded political control in most towns.

In 1784 state legislators passed a “Toleration Act” designed to allow members of dissenting faiths to be exempted from the majority-imposed church taxes but only after they had pleaded their case before a local magistrate and proved their membership in another denomination.

This may have looked like liberalization to Connecticut’s leaders, but to members of often-persecuted minority faiths it was an outrageous violation of freedom of conscience. Further inflaming Baptist anger, a powerful combination of government officials and church leaders essentially ignored the Toleration Act, working in tandem to make it next to impossible for adherents of dissenting faiths to opt out.

The entire system riled Baptists. Even if they could successfully win an exemption from local church taxes, Baptists were offended at the very idea of having to appeal to a government official for this type of relief.

Jefferson’s election to the presidency in 1800 gave Connecticut dissenters a glimmer of hope. Baptists in other states had worked with Enlightenment thinkers like Jefferson in an unusual alliance to champion religious liberty. Undoubtedly, Danbury’s Baptists knew of Jefferson’s leading role in the struggle to end state-established religion in Virginia. Surely, they must have felt, the president would turn a sympathetic ear to the persecuted of Connecticut.

And that is the context in which Jefferson was writing; a world in which churches were using the power of the state to oppress dissenters and enforce piety. In that context, it is clear that the First Amendment was meant not just to protect the church from the state, but to protect the state from undue influence by the church.

Or, as Steve Benen puts it:

[T]he notion that Jefferson’s church-state wall was simply about preventing the government from “mandating a religion on people” is just foolish. Indeed, it’s completely at odds with the historical record.

Governor Palin would do well to study some history on this matter before speaking about it again.

H/T: The Volokh Conspiracy and The Moderate Voice