Last updated: April 1, 2025
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Separation of Church & State History
I infer that the sovereign, original, and foundation of civil power lies in the people.
Image: Library of Congress
What does the phrase, “the separation of church and state” mean? The earliest mention of that metaphor comes from Roger Williams, a minister, lawyer, and merchant who desired a way to worship freely. Williams referenced ‘a high wall’ between church and state to keep the ‘wilderness’ of the human institutions out of the affairs of religion. He strove to prevent the corruption of government from corrupting a person’s freedom of conscience. Or as he called it in 1636, "soul freedom."
Today, the US Constitution’s First Amendment gurantees religious liberty by forbidding congress from establishing a religion or preventing the free exercise of faith. Even more, the form of government that the Constitution creates was designed to limit the authority of the government to only civil matters and made the people the foundation of civil power.
As a result, it protects individual liberty to worship however one chooses without the government being allowed to interfere. Religious freedom was made possible with the establisment of democracy, resting decisions in the hands of the people. At the time, this radical system was called "a lively experiment." But why did Roger Williams and his followers risk trying something so new and radical?
Divine Right to Rule
Before the founding of the colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations (today known as the State of Rhode Island), governments claimed to derive their authority from an almighty source. In some cases, the leader of a country was considered a god (ancient Rome, or Japan until 1945, for example), a political system called a theocracy. If a citizen questioned the authority of a law, they could be accused of defying the will of god. This system of power is known as “the divine right to rule.”
In the centuries after the fall of Rome, European kings adopted Christianity as their religion. Over time, a common religion became a political and spiritual mechanism that connected kingdoms to each other.
A thousand years later, the Catholic Pope Leo X granted King Henry VI, the title Defender of the Faith. It solidified England’s bond to Spain and other Catholic nations. In this way, political power was consolidated across Europe and beyond.
Much to the dismay of European powers, Henry broke from the Catholic political structure and established the protestant Church of England. Henry argued that he wasn't a servant of the Catholic faith because he ruled “by the grace of God alone.” Starting in the 1530s, Henry ruled England as both the king and the head of the English Church. Although England has a representative body, only the monarch allows it to meet.
By the early 1600s, it was well accepted in England that the government carried out the will of the Christian God through the king and his church. The English King James I commissioned a translation of the Bible that is still used today.
But a group of religious reformers disapproved of the practices of the Anglican Church, believing that they were too ritualistic. They argued that their own, simpler and more spontaneous way of worship reliant on the Bible, was the true way. And they set out to correct the King's church, to "purify" it. These people became known as Puritans. With their words and acts of civil disobedience, sedition, treason, and violence, they insisted on worshipping how they saw fit. In the eyes of the government though, they were challenging both the spiritual authority of God and the political authority of the King.
A solution to this political conflict was to include non-conformists into Britain's efforts toward the colonization of America. Many of these non-conformists were granted the opportunity to leave England and settle in North America in exchage for land, sending back resources, and a bit of political independence.
Non-conformists in America
In the Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, and other colonies, religious non-conformists set up new governments with the same source of power - religious authority. These governments claimed that their right to rule was granted to them by the Christian God, and therefore they had power to punish people for their thoughts, beliefs, words, actions, and even bad luck. People were humiliated, banished, fined, beaten, mutilated, tortured, and killed. These punishments were based on interpretations of divine law.
In 1635, this punishment happened to Roger Williams. He was banished from his home in Salem for preaching “new and dangerous opinions” such as religious freedom, spiritual equality of all people, and limiting the authority of magistrates. With arrest imminent, he fled. After months on the run, he was offered refuge by the Narragansett in a place called Moshassuck. Roger renamed it Providence, "with a sense of God's merciful providence unto me in my distress . . . I desired it might be a refuge for persons distressed of conscience." Before long, several English families were living there.
To protect their personal freedom to follow faiths that were right for them, Williams and his followers chose to create a government with limited powers. This was a radical new idea. The laws of this government would only address civil matters. It would have the power to decide issues such as taxes, public works projects, citizenship, property laws, and military affairs, yet could not make any rules addressing religious or spiritual matters.
He stated that the government shall "have no more power, nor for no longer time, than the civil power or people consenting and agreeing shall betrust them with.” By creating a government of the people, Williams freed everyone to follow their own conscience, as he called it, "soul freedom."
Because they needed a fair way to make decisions without drawing on a religious docterine, they chose to use democracy. Democracy proved to be an effective system for limiting the power of governments, granting its citizens exceptional freedoms.
Democracy
When a government claims to derive its authority from a deity, then any decision made by the state is considered a fundamental truth; its citizens no longer have personal freedom. Roger Williams argued that a person's freedoms are inherent to their birth; any law addressing religious docterine, even if the docterine is true, denies its citizens any freedom.
It becomes possible for democratic systems to emerge once the power of government is limited to only civil matters. In democratic systems, citizens or their representatives make laws. Because people are imperfect, this system allows for flawed decisions. Laws and bureaucracies can be repaired and made better over time.
Williams expected flaws in civil government and fiercly defended the rights of people that even he believed to be misguided. For him, it was not only a way to protect his own freedoms, but it was also an act of religious duty.
Roger had to convince a lot of people that a government can be orderly even though a civil law is nothing more than an agreement among the people decided by vote; and that the consent of the people is enough to maintain order as long as the authority of the government remains separate from spiritual affairs.
Many different religions thrived in Rhode Island. For example, Roger Williams gathered the first Baptist church in America. His theology made plain that only because of the separation of church and state, a person may join a church purely of their own free will.
The system of government first used by the people of Providence is an early example of the enlightenment thinking that led to the genius of our founding fathers' philosophy and enshrined in many of their early documents.
The Constitution
Thomas Jefferson, in his letter to the Danbury Baptists reiterates 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..
Is it possible that Jefferson was inspired by Roger Williams to use the “wall of separation” metaphor? We may never know. Jefferson never mentioned Roger Williams.
The First Amendment prevents congress from creating or establishing a religion, and thereby prevents the power of the government from expanding beyond civil matters. The First Amendment also protects people’s right to worship however they choose, or to not worship at all. Protecting people’s right to decide what is right for themselves without government interference is a key foundation (and result) of our democracy.
In 1788, our nation’s Constitution was ratified with the opening words,
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
This sentence assures all the world that the United States government derives its authority from “the People,” and that in striving for “a more perfect Union,” it is flawed and can and should be changed to reflect the will of the people.