The Baptist First Amendment (Matthew Young, Ad Fontes)
In the wake of such decisions, many conservatives and Christians—particularly among Reformed protestants—have questioned the view of the establishment clause, preferring some form of Christian nationalist or establishmentarian regime instead. Yet these reactions surrender the First Amendment too quickly. For what has been lost in the modernist interpretation of the First Amendment is the religious origins of the establishment clause. Contra Justice Black, the religion clauses of the First Amendment did not spring from Enlightenment rationalism or the ideal of a secular public sphere freed from religious influence. Instead, they represented the triumph of a particular and distinctly Protestant (and, to be specific, Baptist) account of the liberty of conscience that rejected religious coercion while still envisioning an expansive role for religion, in which Christianity could shape public life and policy.
Few things written on the First Amendment have been as deeply obfuscating as Hugo Black’s decision to rely on Thomas Jefferson’s beliefs to define the meaning of the First Amendment. While Jefferson may have played a limited role in the fight for religious freedom, there is little reason to give his interpretation primacy. Despite dominating Black’s reading of the law, Jefferson was in France while the Amendment was debated, with his role in promoting the Amendment largely confined to occasional correspondence with James Madison. Moreover, as a rationalist and republican, Jefferson’s hostility toward religious influence in politics was uncharacteristic of the other framers—including most of those who supported the First Amendment. The Amendment was established thanks to an uneasy alliance between Enlightenment deists and the deeply religious—what Sidney Mead famously called the “rationalist-pietist alliance.” The pious—like the Baptist pastors Isaac Backus and John Leland— who supported the Amendment saw it as narrowly forbidding religious coercion, rather than barring religious influence in the public sphere. Jefferson’s view was marginal: despite his apparent attempts to court the Baptists who had allied to secure the Amendment (including his famous letter to the Danbury Baptists on the “wall of separation”), contemporary evidence shows that few, if any, supported Jefferson’s view.
In choosing to elevate Jefferson over, say, Backus, Justice Black sided with those Enlightenment deists and 20th-century liberals for whom the separation of church and state came to represent a sort of contempt for the very religious faith— and religious influence in politics—that birthed it.