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Jefferson’s Wall

The Power of Metaphor in Church and State Debates in the 20th Century US

Summary/Abstract: The American constitutional model of church-state separation is customarily characterized by a quote originating from Thomas Jefferson, who wrote approvingly about a “wall of separation” between government and the churches set up by the First Amendment of the Constitution in a 1802 letter. The metaphor was taken up by the US Supreme Court in a formative 1947 ruling, and it soon acquired the authority of a quasi-constitutional principle, especially in the arguments of the advocates of separationism. Its critics – both on and outside the Court – argued, on the other hand, that the widely used image of the wall is misleading as it mischaracterizes the actual requirements of the First Amendment and suggests a degree of isolation between political power and religion that is impossible or at least impractical to carry out in practice. This essay examines the history of how the “wall of separation” metaphor found its way to Supreme Court decisions about Establishment Clause cases and, after a period of almost ubiquitous use, went into a gradual decline during the 1970s and 1980s as the majority of the Court began to drift toward a more accommodationist interpretation of the Establishment Clause. The investigation involves detailed textual analysis of selected Supreme Court decisions as well as minority opinions of individual justices.

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