The Wall That Keeps the Church Free

Reading Steven K. Green’s essay on the religious and secular roots of church–state separation, I found myself thinking about James M. Dunn.

Dunn, the longtime Baptist advocate for religious liberty, had a gift for reducing complicated constitutional arguments to their theological center. Religious liberty, he often insisted, was the right; separation of church and state was the constitutional guardrail protecting it. The metaphor was characteristically Dunn: direct, practical, and slightly impatient with those who wanted the freedom while dismantling the structure that made it possible.

That is the irony surrounding the current debate. The Trump administration’s Religious Liberty Commission treats the “wall of separation” as though it were one of the principal threats to religious freedom. Green’s history suggests almost the opposite. The wall was not built simply to protect the state from religion. It was also built to protect conscience from coercion and the Church from political control.

Dunn understood that government can regulate conduct, but it cannot create faith. It may compel attendance, prescribe words, reward conformity, or punish dissent. It cannot produce belief. The state is therefore not merely bad at religion. It is incompetent in matters of faith.

This does not require religious people to withdraw from public life. They may speak, vote, organize, protest, teach, hold office, and bring their deepest convictions into public deliberation. Separation of church and state is not separation of religious people from politics. It is the refusal to give political power authority over faith.

Green’s essay places that refusal within a much longer intellectual history. The “wall of separation” did not originate with twentieth-century judges, nor did it spring fully formed from Thomas Jefferson’s pen. It emerged from centuries of argument about the proper limits of spiritual and temporal authority, the nature of conscience, and the dangers that arise when political power claims religious sanction.

The history begins before anything resembling the modern state existed.

Augustine did not advocate the separation of church and state in the modern constitutional sense. His two cities are not two institutions, one sacred and one secular. They are two communities constituted by two loves: the love of God and the love of self.

The state may preserve a measure of peace. It may restrain violence, punish wrongdoing, and establish the conditions under which human beings may live together. But it cannot bring history to its fulfillment. It cannot create the peace that is humanity’s final end. Every political order remains provisional, morally ambiguous, and subject to judgment.

This distinction between temporal and ultimate goods would shape Western political thought long after Augustine. Medieval theology developed an intricate account of spiritual and temporal authority, though the boundaries between the two were frequently contested. Popes and emperors both claimed forms of supremacy. The question was not whether religion and politics would interact. They inevitably did. The question was whether one authority could absorb the other.

Thomas Aquinas gave civil government a genuine, natural purpose. Political community was not merely a regrettable consequence of sin. Human beings are social and political creatures, and temporal authority may properly seek the common good. Yet even a just political order remained ordered toward goods it could not itself provide. The state could direct human beings toward civil peace and natural virtue. It could not confer grace or bring them to beatitude.

The Reformation intensified the problem. Luther distinguished between God’s spiritual and temporal governance. Calvin distinguished ecclesiastical authority from civil jurisdiction, though Geneva would hardly satisfy modern separationists. Neither theologian imagined the religiously neutral state. Nevertheless, both contributed to the gradual differentiation of institutions and jurisdictions.

The more radical step came from those Christians who had reason to fear not merely the misuse of establishment but establishment itself.

Anabaptists, Baptists, Quakers, and other dissenters came to understand that faith loses its character when supported by coercion. Government may compel outward conformity. It cannot create belief. It may require a person to attend worship, recite a creed, receive a sacrament, or utter a prayer. It cannot make any of those actions acts of faith.

This is the theological insight behind what James M. Dunn called “soul freedom.” Dunn, the longtime Baptist advocate for religious liberty, insisted that each person stands directly accountable to God. Neither state nor church may occupy that place. Religious liberty is the right; separation is the constitutional guardrail that protects it.

Dunn’s argument was not that religious convictions should be excluded from politics. Believers remain citizens. They may speak, vote, organize, protest, hold office, and bring their deepest commitments into public deliberation. The separation of church and state is not the separation of religious people from public life.

It is the separation of religious authority from governmental power.

Roger Williams understood the point before Jefferson. Williams’s wall protected the garden of the church from the wilderness of the world. The direction of the protection is worth noticing. In later rhetoric, the wall is often imagined as something secular society erected to keep religion out. For Williams, the danger also moved in the opposite direction. The Church needed protection from political power.

John Locke approached the issue through a developing philosophy of toleration. Church and commonwealth were distinct societies with distinct purposes. The magistrate was concerned with civil interests. The church was a voluntary society ordered toward the salvation of souls. Because faith depends upon inward persuasion, it cannot be produced by force.

Locke’s argument was not as universal as later readers sometimes imagine. His toleration had limits. Still, he helped articulate a principle that would become central to liberal political philosophy: coercion is peculiarly unsuited to religious belief.

Jefferson’s wall therefore condensed a long argument. It did not create it.

James Madison put the matter with particular clarity. Religion is exempt from the authority of society because it precedes civil society. The duty owed to the Creator is not granted by government and therefore cannot be revoked by government. Religious liberty is not a concession offered by a tolerant majority. It is a limit upon the majority’s jurisdiction.

Green’s history matters because the Trump administration’s Religious Liberty Commission treats the wall of separation as though it were chiefly an instrument of exclusion. According to this account, the metaphor has been used to push religious Americans from the public square.

There is some truth hidden within that complaint. Separation has occasionally been interpreted carelessly. A public school teacher does not cease to possess religious freedom upon entering a classroom. A legislator does not violate the Constitution merely by being influenced by faith. A citizen’s religious speech is not transformed into governmental establishment simply because it is spoken in public.

But recognizing the misuse of a principle does not require abandoning the principle.

The commission’s more serious mistake is its tendency to confuse equal participation by religious citizens with governmental support for religion. The two are not the same. There is a difference between Christians speaking in public and the government speaking as though it were Christian. There is a difference between churches seeking the common good and the state selecting religious institutions for favor. There is a difference between religion influencing politics and politics appropriating religion.

Political power does not always threaten the Church by persecuting it. Sometimes it threatens the Church by flattering it.

The state offers access, prestige, funding, ceremonial honor, and proximity to power. In return, it asks religion to become useful. The Church is invited to bless national ambitions, legitimate political leaders, sanctify contested policies, and reassure citizens that the purposes of the nation and the purposes of God are one.

This is why an Anglican and a Baptist may agree.

The Baptist remembers that the magistrate cannot produce faith and must not trespass upon the soul.

The Anglican remembers, or should remember, that no earthly realm is the kingdom of God. Establishment has given Anglicanism a long history of proximity to power, along with repeated demonstrations of the spiritual hazards of that proximity. A church may become so accustomed to blessing the social order that it loses the ability to judge it.

Richard Hooker did not envision a modern separation of church and state. His commonwealth was Christian, and church and society were deeply intertwined. Yet Hooker’s careful account of law may still guard against political absolutism. Human law remains human. It is rational, necessary, and capable of serving the common good, but it is neither eternal nor divine. No constitution, statute, monarch, president, or nation may claim the authority that belongs to God alone.

The Christian case for separation is therefore not based on the insignificance of religion. It rests upon religion’s importance.

Faith is too important to be manufactured by government.

The Church is too important to become a department of the state.

Conscience is too important to be placed at the disposal of a religious majority.

And the kingdom of God is too important to be confused with any political regime.

The wall of separation does not require Christians to retreat from public life. The Church should preach, teach, serve, protest, advocate, and call rulers to account. It should seek justice and the common good. It should form citizens capable of public responsibility.

But it must do so in its own voice, neither silenced by the state nor speaking as the state’s chaplain.

Green is right about the history. Dunn is right about the theology. Separation is not the enemy of religious liberty. It is one of the disciplines by which religious liberty is preserved.

The irony is that Christians who seek political protection may surrender precisely the freedom they hope to secure.

The wall does not keep the Church from speaking.

It may be what keeps the Church’s speech free.