The Wall Between Church and State Predates America

The Trump administration's Religious Liberty Commission has a villain in mind, and its name is a metaphor. The "wall of separation between church and state," the Commission argues, is the reason religious freedom is under siege in America. Tear down the wall, the logic goes, and religious liberty gets restored.

I understand the appeal of that story. It's clean. It has a single culprit and a single fix. But it depends on treating the wall as a modern secular invention, something Thomas Jefferson dreamed up in 1802 to keep faith out of public life. History doesn't support that. As a recent piece in Religion News Service traced, the idea of separating spiritual and political authority runs back through Augustine, through medieval popes, through Reformation theologians, and through Baptist dissenters who wanted the wall built for reasons that had nothing to do with secularism and everything to do with protecting their own faith.

That last part is the piece I think gets lost. The people who built this wall weren't trying to keep religion out. Several of them were trying to keep religion safe.

A Wall With Two Different Architects

Here's the juxtaposition that I keep coming back to: the phrase "wall of separation" was used by two men separated by more than 150 years, and they meant almost opposite things by it.

Roger Williams, the Puritan-turned-Baptist who founded Rhode Island after being banished from Massachusetts Bay in 1636, wrote of a "hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world." Williams wanted the wall to protect the garden. He had watched the Massachusetts theocracy punish dissenting believers, and he concluded that when the state gets its hands on the church, the church is what suffers. His wall faced outward, guarding faith from politics.

Jefferson picked up the same image in his 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, reassuring a group of Connecticut Baptists who feared their state's religious establishment would swallow their freedom of conscience. Jefferson's wall faced the other direction. He wanted to keep the state from being captured by any single church, Baptist or otherwise.

Same phrase. Same physical image of a wall. Opposite anxieties. Williams was protecting the church from the state. Jefferson was protecting the state from the church. In my view, that's the detail the current debate keeps skipping past, and it's the detail that actually explains why the wall has survived this long. It was never one person's idea. It was two fears meeting in the middle.

Augustine's Two Cities

To find where this really starts, you have to go back to a bishop in North Africa writing in the ashes of a collapsing empire. When Rome was sacked in 410, pagan critics blamed Christianity, arguing that the empire's abandonment of its old gods had brought down divine punishment. Augustine's response, written over more than a decade and published as The City of God, was to argue that Rome had never been the point. There are two cities, he wrote, the earthly city built on love of self and the heavenly city built on love of God, and Christians are citizens of the second even while they live inside the first.

Augustine wasn't proposing a constitutional arrangement. He had no First Amendment in mind. But he was doing something that turned out to matter enormously for everything that followed: he was refusing to let the fate of the church get tied to the fate of the state. Rome could fall. The city of God would not. That distinction, between an eternal community of faith and a temporary political order, is the root system underneath every later argument for separation. If the church's identity depends on the empire's survival, the church has no ground to stand on when the empire fails. Augustine gave it separate ground.

Gelasius and the Two Swords

Eighty years later, Pope Gelasius I made Augustine's distinction into something closer to doctrine. In a letter to the Byzantine emperor Anastasius in 494, Gelasius argued that God had divided the governance of the world between two authorities, the sacred authority of bishops and the royal power of emperors, and that neither should absorb the other. This became known as the doctrine of the two swords: one spiritual, one temporal, both real, neither subordinate to the other by default.

It's worth sitting with how different this is from a secular argument for separation. Gelasius wasn't trying to shrink religion's role in public life. He was trying to protect the church's authority from being overridden by an emperor who very much wanted to run ecclesiastical affairs himself. The wall, in this telling, exists because the church has something worth guarding, not because religion has nothing to offer the state.

Luther's Two Kingdoms

Fast forward a thousand years and you get Martin Luther, writing in 1523 in the middle of the Reformation's political chaos, developing what became known as the doctrine of the two kingdoms. Luther argued that God governs the world through two distinct means: the spiritual kingdom, ruled through the gospel and operating on conscience, and the temporal kingdom, ruled through law and operating on force. Try to run the church like a government, Luther warned, and you get coercion instead of faith. Try to run the government like a church, and you get chaos instead of order.

Luther's version adds something the earlier frameworks didn't emphasize as strongly: the individual conscience. He wasn't just protecting an institution, he was protecting a person's inner relationship to God from being conscripted by a sword. That's a short step from Roger Williams standing in the Rhode Island wilderness a century later, insisting that soul liberty can't be legislated.

Roger Williams: The Garden and the Wilderness

Which brings the thread back around. Williams took Luther's concern for conscience and Augustine's concern for the church's separate identity and fused them into a lived, physical experiment: a colony with no established church at all, chartered in 1663 with an explicit guarantee of liberty of conscience, decades before Jefferson was born.

Williams was not a secularist by any definition we'd recognize today. He was a committed, arguably fanatical, believer who left multiple religious communities because none of them was pure enough for him. He wanted the wall precisely because he took faith so seriously. A church protected by the state, in his view, becomes a church corrupted by the state. Soul liberty required distance.

Jefferson Borrows a Metaphor

Jefferson's 1802 letter didn't invent this argument. It inherited it, and applied it in a new context: a written constitution with a First Amendment barring Congress from making any law "respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Jefferson was writing to Baptists again, the same dissenting tradition Williams came from, still worried in 1802 that their state's religious establishment could crowd out their freedom to worship as they chose. Jefferson told them the First Amendment had already built the wall they were asking about. He was describing, not creating.

The nine words of the First Amendment's religion clauses never use the word "wall" or the word "separation." Jefferson's letter is a gloss, a widely quoted one, but a gloss. And it's a gloss that draws on more than a century of religious argument for why that wall needed to exist in the first place.

How Five Frameworks Compare

Laid side by side, the throughline is less about excluding religion and more about who the wall is protecting, and from what.

Notice the direction shift happening across that table. For thirteen centuries, from Augustine to Williams, the wall mostly protected faith from politics. Jefferson's version, embedded in a governing document rather than a theological letter, is the first to formally protect politics from faith. Both directions matter. A debate that only remembers Jefferson's direction, and forgets the thirteen centuries of religious thinkers arguing for the other direction, is working from half the history.

Whose Wall Is It Protecting?

This is where I think the Religious Liberty Commission's framing runs into trouble. Its argument treats the wall as an obstacle religion has to get past to be free. But for most of the wall's history, religious people built it to be free from something else: an emperor who wanted to appoint bishops, a state church that punished Baptists for preaching without a license, a monarch who wanted the sword of the state and the sword of the altar in the same hand.

Massachusetts kept a tax-supported established church until 1833, more than four decades after the First Amendment was ratified. Disestablishment there wasn't secularism defeating religion. It was, in large part, dissenting Protestants, Baptists and Methodists among them, finally winning a fight against a religious establishment that had used state power to disadvantage them for two centuries. The wall, in other words, has a track record of protecting minority faiths from majority ones. Pull it down, and the question isn't whether religion gets more freedom. The question is whose religion, and at whose expense.

I don't think this makes every current religious liberty concern illegitimate. There are real, specific disputes worth taking seriously: what public funding can support, what accommodations schools owe religious students, how far government can go in regulating religious institutions' internal affairs. Those are genuine questions. But they're questions about where exactly the wall should run, not about whether a wall belongs there at all. Treating fourteen centuries of religious argument for separation as if it were a twentieth-century secular imposition gets the history backwards, and I think it also gets the stakes backwards. The wall was mostly built by believers, for believers, against other believers who had captured the state.

Why This History Matters Now

If you're trying to make sense of religious liberty rhetoric in 2026, the historical record gives you a useful test. When someone argues for tearing down the wall, ask which direction they're facing. Are they trying to free the church from state control, in the tradition of Augustine and Williams? Or are they trying to give one religious tradition state backing over others, which is the exact arrangement the wall was built to prevent?

Those two things get described with identical language, "restoring religious liberty," and they produce opposite outcomes. A commission that can't or won't distinguish between them isn't clarifying the debate. It's collapsing it.

I keep thinking about Williams standing at the edge of his colony, having been thrown out of one religious community for being too devout in the wrong way, building a place with no state church at all so that his own soul liberty, and everyone else's, would have somewhere to stand. He wasn't hedging against faith. He was hedging for it. Maybe that's the question worth sitting with here: when the wall comes down, whose garden is actually left exposed?

Frequently Asked Questions

Who first used the phrase "wall of separation between church and state"? Roger Williams used the image of a "wall of separation" between the "garden of the church" and the "wilderness of the world" in 1644, more than 150 years before Thomas Jefferson's 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association made the phrase famous.

Does the Constitution actually say "separation of church and state"? No. The First Amendment states that Congress shall make no law "respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." The phrase "wall of separation" comes from Jefferson's letter interpreting that clause, not from the constitutional text itself.

Was Augustine arguing for the modern separation of church and state? Not directly. Augustine's City of God distinguished the eternal, spiritual community of faith from the temporal political order, which laid the conceptual groundwork later thinkers built on, but he wasn't proposing anything like a constitutional arrangement between a church and a secular government.

Why did religious dissenters historically support separating church and state? Groups like the Baptists that Williams and Jefferson both corresponded with were often religious minorities who had been penalized, taxed, or persecuted by a state-established majority church. Separation protected their freedom to worship differently, not their freedom from worship.

What is the Religious Liberty Commission? It's a body convened under the Trump administration that has argued religious freedom in the United States is under threat, in part because of what it characterizes as an overly rigid "wall of separation" between church and state.

Last updated: 2026-08-04