Christian Edmonds has posted "Isaac Backus and the Influence of Evangelical Separationism on the Religion Clauses of the First Amendment." The article appears in Volume 56, no. 4 of the Creighton Law Review (2023). Here's the abstract:
In an 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in Connecticut, then-president Thomas Jefferson highlighted the “wall of separation” metaphor. Jefferson stated that “only the complete separation of religion from politics would eliminate the formal influence of religious institutions and provide for a free choice among political views.” This doctrine, also known as “strict separationism,” would become extremely influential in the Supreme Court understandings of the relationship between church and state. For example, in Everson v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court relied on Jefferson’s metaphor, stating that “[t]he First Amendment has erected a wall between church and state. That wall must be kept high and impregnable. We could not approve the slightest breach.” The Court “recognized that the provisions of the First Amendment, in the drafting and adoption of which Madison and Jefferson played such leading roles, had the same objective and were intended to provide the same protection against governmental intrusion on religious liberty as the Virginia statute.” Since Everson, there has been ongoing debate whether that metaphor accurately reflects the meaning of the Religion Clauses. Some have branded “wall of separation” jurisprudence as revisionist history, but many still rely on enlightenment separationists like Madison and Jefferson to understand the origins of the Religion Clauses. Believing that enlightenment separationists’ opinions were “instrumental” in the phrasing of the Religion Clauses, many scholars have “looked behind the words of the First Amendment” to determine their “purest expressions” in the views of Madison and Jefferson.
Interestingly, Jefferson and Madison’s views were far from typical of most Americans during the time of the United States’ founding. Their positions were far too rationalistic and anticlerical to represent the views characteristic of most eighteenth-century Americans. The Great Awakening altered “the evangelical tradition from a collection of beleaguered congregations into a formidable force of Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, and other free church communities.” By the late eighteenth-century, the United States was a “largely Protestant population,” and the country’s denominational makeup at the time proves such—most Americans were Baptist, Presbyterian, or Methodist. As historian Henry May remarked, the Enlightenment worldview “excludes many, probably most, people who lived in America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.” Thus, it seems hardly logical to expect the views of eighteenth-century deistic Episcopalians to accurately represent the views of a rapidly growing evangelical majority.
If this is true, scholars should recognize that a balanced account of the creation of the Religion Clauses cannot rely too heavily on the writings of enlightenment separationists. The context in which the Religion Clauses were written requires an understanding of the influence evangelical separationism had on American culture. Of the evangelical separationists, there were none more outspoken than Baptists. Historian Willard L. Sperry observed that “[t]he Baptists were undoubtably the most aggressive and also the most effective single religious body in the colonies, so far as the demand for religious liberty was concerned.” And historians have claimed that “the most important American Baptist leader and polemicist of the eighteenth century” was Isaac Backus, whose “dedicated, effective leadership for eighteenth-century pietism . . . entitles him to rank with … Jefferson, and Madison as a key proponent of [the separation of church and state].” Though Backus played a central role in the United States’ formative period, his contributions have been neglected. This has created a “gap in understanding the rise of the dissenting sects and the development of evangelical [separationism] in America.” This article will attempt to give Backus and evangelical separationism their rightful place in future evaluations of the separation of church and state.
The twofold focuses of this article are, first, to introduce Backus to those who may not have been aware of his importance and of his approach to issues of religious freedom. And second, to present and evaluate the evidence of Backus and evangelical separatists’ impact on the Religion Clauses of the First Amendment. The paper will highlight why Backus’s views and writings are critical to understanding the context in which the Religion Clauses were written and ratified. If jurists and scholars insist on using history as a means to interpretation, they must discuss the prominent American tradition that influenced the drafting of the First Amendment—evangelical separationism. Backus’s perspective on government and religion represented the majority of Americans in the eighteenth-century, and therefore, his church–state theory provides scholars and jurists with a focused synopsis of the evangelical separationist tradition and a way to better understand the 18th century cultural climate.
Read on here, at SSRN. (h/t Legal Theory Blog)
-- Karen Tani
