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