Many people know Thomas Jefferson's phrase about a "wall of separation between church and state." Fewer know how that phrase entered constitutional law. It's a curious story, which I discuss in a new Legal Spirits podcast with historians Don and Lisa Drakeman.
The story begins with Jefferson's 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists, written to reassure them that he shared their view of church-state relations. In that letter, Jefferson wrote that the First Amendment had built "a wall of separation between church and state." The metaphor was memorable, but the letter was not widely circulated and largely disappeared from public memory.
This was not surprising. Jefferson played no direct role in drafting of the Constitution or the First Amendment. Although he wrote the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom in the 1780s, which influenced American thinking about liberty of conscience, he was abroad during the Philadelphia Convention and, by the time Congress proposed the Bill of Rights in 1789, he was serving as Secretary of State. The Religion Clauses were the product of Madison and the First Congress, not Jefferson.
