With one minute look at culture from a Christian worldview, I'm John Stone Street with a point.

No statement about religious liberty has generated more controversy than when Thomas Jefferson

and a letter to the Danbury Baptist prescribed a wall of separation between church and state.

And the key question is what the wall was meant to keep out.

Many assumed Jefferson wanted to keep religion out of politics, but a new video from the

first Liberty Institute explains the letter's context.

Feeling pressure that Connecticut had established the Congregationalist Church, the Danbury

Baptist and Jefferson wished to keep the government out of religion.

Although not a Christian in any Orthodox sense, Jefferson did not want religion abolished

from public life.

Just two days after writing the Danbury letter, for example, he held church services

in the House of Representatives.

This, as a recent Library of Congress exhibit makes clear, was a deliberate way of supporting

religion as an act of Republican government.

And of course Jefferson argued that nature and nature's God endows people with an alienable

rights.

That includes the right to religious expression.

For the Coulson Center, I'm John Stone Street.