In 1802, President Thomas Jefferson sent a letter, since famous, reassuring the Baptists of Danbury, Conn., of their right to worship. “I contemplate with sovereign reverence,” he wrote, “a wall of separation between Church & State.”
In his ambitious “Chosen Land,” a chronicle of Christianity in America, Matthew Avery Sutton points out that Jefferson’s well-known metaphor does not in fact appear in the Constitution. A professor of history at Washington State University, Sutton contends that the so-called establishment clause to the Constitution declaring that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” was purposefully written in a language so ambiguous that it allowed people to decide precisely “how much religion they wanted in their government.”
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