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Wall of Separation?

The phrase “separation between church & state” is generally traced to a January 1, 1802 letter by Thomas Jefferson, addressed to the Danbury Baptist Association in Connecticut, and published in a Massachusetts newspaper. Jefferson wrote, “I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.” Jefferson was echoing the language of the founder of the first Baptist church in America, Roger Williams who had written in 1644, “[A] hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world.” However, the second President of the United States, John Adams, wrote to Thomas Jefferson in 1813, “The general principles on which the fathers achieved independence were the general principles of Christianity, and I will avow that I then believed, and still now believe, that those general principles of Christianity are as eternal and immutable as the existence and attributes of God, and that those principles of liberty are as unalterable as human nature.” So, which is to be believed in this strange dichotomy of perceptions? Church and State examines this “wall of separation” with relation to the underpinnings of Christian theism.