Johnson: Separation Of Church And State Is “Misnomer”
November 14, 2023

Speaker Johnson: Separation of church, state ‘a misnomer’

BY LAUREN SFORZA - 11/14/23 9:44 AM ET

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) pushed back Tuesday on the belief that there should be separation between church and state on the U.S., arguing that the founding fathers wanted faith to be a “big part” of government.

“Separation of church and state … is a misnomer. People misunderstand it,” Johnson said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” when asked about him praying on the House floor. “Of course, it comes from a phrase that was in a letter that Jefferson wrote is not in the Constitution.”

“And what he was explaining is they did not want the government to encroach upon the church, not that they didn’t want principles of faith to have influence on our public life. It’s exactly the opposite,” the Speaker added.

The letter that Johnson referred to is Thomas Jefferson’s 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists Association of Connecticut, who had expressed concerns about religious liberty. In his reply, Jefferson said that the First Amendment, which bars Congress from prohibiting free exercise of a religion, built “a wall of separation between Church & State.”

{etc.}

For Religious Freedom Day: What Jefferson Really Thought of Theocrat Patrick Henry
Categories: Uncategorized
by Chris Rodda

So, today {January 16} is Religious Freedom Day, the anniversary of the passage of Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. No, I’m not going to post Jefferson’s statute; I’m going to post something cooler than that — one of my favorite lines ever written by Jefferson.

The background: Jefferson drafted his religious freedom statute in 1777 and introduced it in 1779, but it didn’t go anywhere. It wasn’t until 1786 that Jefferson’s statute was passed. Jefferson was in France at the time, so it was Madison who reintroduced the religious freedom statute. This was right after James Madison defeated Patrick Henry’s bill to tax everybody in Virginia to support teachers of the Christian religion.

Jefferson couldn’t stand Patrick Henry and his theocratic agenda, and made this quite clear in one {of} his letters to Madison while Madison was battling Henry’s bill for a Christian religious tax. When Madison wrote to Jefferson asking what they should do about Henry, Jefferson replied:

“While Mr. Henry Lives another bad constitution would be formed, and saddled for ever on us. What we have to do I think is devoutly to pray for his death …”

Of course, the Christian nationalist history revisionists either ignore this line from Jefferson, or claim it is made up by evil secularists to impugn the character of our very Christian founding fathers.

{snip}

{This is} from a letter written by Thomas Jefferson to James Madison on December 8, 1784, and can be found on pages 353-354 of The Republic Of Letters, The Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison 1776-1826, Volume I.