#1517 Wall of Separation

Listening to America

Society & Culture, History

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 18 October 2022

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week on the Thomas Jefferson Hour, President Jefferson returns to discuss the famous letter he wrote in 1802 to the Danbury Baptists association saying it was not the duty of government to do anything that might be interpreted as the establishment of religion. In this letter, he used the famous phrase "wall of separation between church and state." Jefferson explains that the first amendment of the Constitution states that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Good day, Thomas Jefferson. Our podcast listeners has always thank you for taking the time to listen
0:07.1	this week of a very interesting conversation that I was looking forward to having
0:12.4	with President Thomas Jefferson. We talked about the wall of separation between church and state
0:19.5	and as always his insights into this are very valuable. Jefferson felt so strongly about this.
0:28.0	You know he was he was not an atheist. He was a deist in the Unitarian. Yes, he edited the
0:34.4	New Testament as a private meditation during his time as third president of the United States.
0:40.8	He kept his personal religious views extremely close to the chest and refused. Point blank
0:49.6	questions about his actual religious sensibilities, partly because he believed that they were truly
0:55.7	private and no one's business but his own. But he also knew how volatile questions of religion
1:03.1	were and his time and still are. I mean I actually I think Jefferson would have a harder time
1:07.5	being elected president today than in his own time because it was clear to everyone. I mean
1:14.6	whatever else they thought they might have thought he was an atheist but everyone knew that he
1:18.2	was a free thinker that he had advanced views that he was skeptical of the miracles that he was an
1:24.9	anti-Trinitarian that he had had some conflicts with religious leaders and so on and that he had
1:32.9	written this breathtaking law for Virginia, the Virginia statute for religious liberty and now had
1:38.1	written the letter to the Danbury Baptist which wasn't widely circulated in his time but
1:44.2	but was known and so everyone in the country knew Jefferson is an unusual man. He's not a standard
1:50.2	issue Christian and that he has some views that would be regarded in some quarters as controversial.
1:59.6	So Jefferson was well aware of that and he needed to protect his privacy because it would have
2:05.6	damaged him severely if all that we now know about his religious views had been published in his
2:12.4	time unlike John Adams. He didn't have to publish everything that passed through his heart or his
2:18.1	mind so it's a fascinating story and I believe that he is absolutely right on this one that when
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