Wall of Separation

The "Wall of Separation" is used to represent a hypothetical "wall" between church and state. This division, while it does not appear anywhere in the U.S. Constitution, is supported by many liberals who feel that the Establishment Clause provides for such a separation.

The phrase originally came from Roger Williams and was later quoted by Thomas Jefferson in a letter to the colony founded by Roger Williams, Rhode Island. However, Rhode Island did not even send a representative to the Constitutional Convention and refused for economic reasons for years even to ratify the U.S. Constitution.

Roger Williams had been found guilty of preaching religious liberty in England, and he fled to Boston on Feb. 5, 1631. He was banished from that region by Puritan John Cotton.

Roger Williams next befriended the Narragansett Indians, who gave him land for Providence Plantation, Rhode Island. This became the first place in America where state government did not control church government.

In 1639, Williams established the first Baptist Church in America. In response to his nemesis Mr. Cotton, Williams published "Mr. Cotton's Letter Lately Printed, Examined and Answered" (1644). In this Roger Williams wrote:

The church of the Jews under the Old Testament in the type, and the church of the Christians under the New Testament in the anti-type, were both separate from the world; and when they 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 broken down the wall ... 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.

This was the "wall of separation" to which Jefferson referred in his letter to the Danbury Baptists in 1802.