Three new books collectively examine the collaboration of two founding fathers that led to the establishment of federal church-state separation, the 1925 trial that put church-state separation on the stand and in national news, and a proposal to save church-state separation in our present day.
Steven K. Green, The Grand Collaboration: Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and the Invention of American Religious Freedom. University of Virginia Press, 2024.
At a time when the fate of church-state separation “is in flux,” Steven K. Green, Fred H. Paulus Professor of Law and professor of history and religious studies at Willamette University, and former AU legal director, turns our attention to two of America’s founding fathers who, with grassroots support from religious dissenters, stewarded growing currents of free inquiry, freedom of conscience and freedom of religion into law.
Green addresses two questions: Why were Virginians Thomas Jefferson and James Madison — upper class Enlightenment rationalists and religiously heterodox — committed to religious freedom? And how did the two men’s “evolving views about church and state” complement and reinforce each other over half a century?
Delving deep into primary sources, Green breaks new ground in documenting a bold claim: “American religious freedom today is the invention of Jefferson and Madison.”
Products of a pre-revolutionary 18th century absent “true religious freedom and equality” yet nurturing “an impulse of recognizing greater religious freedom in America,” the two men, driven by the strong wind of human reason, gazed askew at Anglican dominance and found affinity with religious dissenters.
Influenced by their times, baptized into the Anglican Church and highly educated (Jefferson at the College of William and Mary, Madison at Princeton), the two men arrived at a commitment to religious freedom from different yet complimentary backgrounds. A “general commitment to free inquiry and freedom of conscience” drove Jefferson, a “moralist” placing reason above religion who, based on “conventional understandings of the day, was not a Christian, nor thought of himself as one.” To the contrary, Enlightenment legends Bacon, Newton and Locke were his “trinity of the greatest men the world had produced,” though Jefferson went beyond Locke’s “mere toleration” of religious dissenters and embraced equal religious freedom for all.
Madison, the younger of the two, also received an Enlightenment education. Unlike Jefferson, though, as a young man he briefly dabbled in Calvinist doctrine before settling into a life absent “compelling evidence” that he “held conventional religious beliefs.” Encounters with nearby Baptists suffering persecutions under Virginia’s Anglican rule brought religious freedom to Madison’s attention, leading in 1773 to a pivotal question: “Is an Ecclesiastical Establishment absolutely necessary to support civil society” in government? Concluding in the negative, a still young Madison in May 1776 as a delegate to Virginia’s provincial convention first tried, but failed, to disestablish the Anglican state church.
Church-state separation yet on his mind, Madison first met Jefferson in October 1776 at the convening of the Virginia legislature’s newly established Committee for Religious Freedom. There the two men reviewed petitions from Baptist and Presbyterian dissenters demanding an end, not only to their own persecutions by the establishment church, but the abolishment of establishment religion altogether. Allying with religious dissenters in a quest to separate church and state in Virginia, Madison the emerging political strategist and Jefferson the influential and prominent statesman (governor of Virginia from 1779 to 1781) together envisioned a greater freedom than mere separation from England.
After drafting the Declaration of Independence, which ultimately passed in modified form, Jefferson in the fall of 1776 penned Virginia resolutions that would overturn laws punishing blasphemy and heresy and abolish the state’s establishment church. Together Jefferson and Madison appealed to the legislature, but with only partial success: most notably, the annulling of a law requiring dissenters to pay taxes in support of the Anglican Church. Jefferson deemed their efforts “the severest contests in which I have ever been engaged.”
Still, they persisted. In 1777, Jefferson drafted his revolutionary Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom, a bill that would both abolish the establishment church and fully protect the religious opinions and beliefs of all persons, freedoms grounded not in religion, but in “a natural right.” A yearslong stalemate with little progress ensued, Jefferson, Madison and large numbers of vocal religious dissenters on one side, Anglican (renamed Episcopal) legislators and clergy on the other.
In 1785, Jefferson moved abroad as U.S. Minister to France, monitoring progress from afar. Madison, his political skills and strategy maturing, in the face of stiff resistance finally marshaled Jefferson’s bill into law (with slight modifications) in 1786. Known as the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, Jefferson’s bill-turned-law became “the standard by which all other [church-state separation] measures would be judged.”
Having with Jefferson led the transformation of Virginia from a religious state to a secular state, Madison was elected as a Virginia state representative to the federal Constitutional Convention of 1787. Although delegates were not charged with addressing matters of religion, late in the proceedings a proposal by South Carolina’s Charles Pinckney declared that “no religious test or qualification shall ever be annexed to any office under the authority of the U.S.” In modified form, this revolutionary clause easily passed, with Madison’s approval.
Meanwhile, many Americans, concerned that the Constitution did not adequately protect individual freedoms, lobbied for the inclusion of a Bill of Rights. Jefferson agreed; Madison was reluctant. With the urging of Jefferson and Virginia Baptists, Madison was persuaded to support a constitutional amendment expressly protecting freedom of conscience and religion and keeping religion and the federal government separate. Together and with the support of religious dissenters, the two men composed the religion clauses of the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” — words expressly separating church from state and protecting freedom of religion and conscience for all, equally.
Following this apex period of their religious freedom collaboration, Jefferson and Madison for the rest of their lives protected their hallmark achievements while working together in national governance, retirement and the establishment of the University of Virginia as the nation’s first secular public university.
Green concludes that a deep devotion to free inquiry, requiring the “ability to fashion and hold heterodox ideas” — “the core of freedom of conscience” — led Jefferson and Madison to successfully work together to enshrine religious freedom, “one of the more significant manifestations of freedom of inquiry,” into the U.S. Constitution.
So successful was their decadeslong religious freedom collaboration that it remains, in Green’s estimation, “unmatched” in “informing and influencing the decisions of jurists and policymakers on church-state controversies.”
Brenda Wineapple, Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial that Riveted a Nation. Random House, 2024.
One hundred and fifty years after the American Revolution began, and nearly a century after Thomas Jefferson’s death, church-state separation made national headlines for 12 dramatic days in the famed Scopes Trial of July 1925.
In her riveting account of the “trial of the century,” Brenda Wineapple, award-winning author and scholar, first sets the historical stage. Expanding historical evidence revealing the evolutionary emergence of humans via natural selection — first popularized by Charles Darwin — stirred the embers of an emerging Christian fundamentalist movement devoted to a literal, inerrant Bible in which God created the world and humans in seven days. Prior to Darwin, the biblical Genesis creation account was often taught in public schools. Following Darwin’s 1859 On the Origin of Species, science classes increasingly incorporated scientific evolution into the curriculum.
Worried that God was being displaced in the classroom, fundamentalists in the early 20th century went on the offensive, culminating in the Scopes Trial. Wineapple examines this Bible Belt drama in the small town of Dayton, Tennessee, that put God and democracy on the stand.
Famed populist presidential candidate, lawyer and orator William Jennings Bryan, representing God, sought “a consolidation of a theocracy — a nation of Christians that legally enforced moral behavior and could thereby revive the values that he associated with a white, rural, decent and upstanding America.” Squaring off against Bryan and God, well-known criminal lawyer Clarence Darrow, an agnostic representing inclusive democracy, connected religious freedom for all not only to public education, but also to “the right to speak, to assemble, to write, to work.”
Both men claimed Jefferson’s legacy: Each shared a belief in the rights of ordinary citizens and in democracy. Bryan believed that democracy could be dictated by decree when necessary. Darrow insisted that “there could be no democracy without reason.”
With the stage set, Wineapple fleshes out both men as their careers and ideologies converge and clash in court, their fame drawing journalists far and wide to cover the trial, named after defendant John Scopes, a local public high school teacher accused of teaching evolution in the classroom — a practice recently forbidden by state law.
Readers find themselves in the sweltering courtroom with the judge, jury, defendant, lawyers, spectators, newspapermen, “at least fifty cameramen” from near and far, and a radioman — this the first live broadcast of a trial in America. A smug Bryan, for years openly criticizing evolution, is dressed in a rumpled suit and feels at home. Chicagoan Darrow, an outsider aware he is looked down upon by locals, wears suspenders. Onlookers gasp when Darrow objects to the customary daily prayer during trial proceedings. The International News Service covers the controversy.
Day after day spectators sit, “often with a Bible open on their laps,” the Holy Book being on trial and awaiting its defender Bryan. Darrow seeks to call scientists to the stand; the judge refuses. Pressing, Darrow’s team obtains permission to have a limited number of scientists’ statements affirming evolution read into the record. Bryan’s demand that the jury not be allowed to hear the statements is granted. But over news wires and by radio the outside world learns of evidence of human evolution.
Tension grows, the daily crowds swell, the proceedings move outdoors “in the sultry summer heat.” Bryan, having studied the Bible “for more than fifty years,” challenges Darrow. The biblical creation account is literally accurate, he insists. The crowd thrills.
But this is the moment for which Darrow has been waiting. With Bryan on the stand, Bibles in the laps of onlookers and a nation affixed from afar, the northern lawyer methodically picks apart a sweating Bryan’s nonsensical, albeit popular, biblically literal theology.
Although Darrow ultimately loses his case to a prejudiced Bible Belt, the trial leaves Bryan a broken man who dies within days of the Scopes decision. Fundamentalism, scorned in the press, is momentarily subdued. And yet left behind in rural Tennessee in the summer of 1925 were lingering anti-church state separation seeds that in time grew and became part and parcel of today’s Christian Nationalist movement.
Jonathan Rauch, Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain With Democracy. Yale University Press, 2025.
Examining America’s current existential crisis fostered by Christian Nationalism, Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and contributing writer for the Atlantic, “speaking as an atheist and a scientific materialist,” declares “it has become pretty evident that secularism has not been able to fill what has been called the ‘God-shaped hole’ in American life.” Seeking a way forward beyond the impasse, he calls for Christians and secularists to collaborate in saving America’s democracy.
Rauch, echoing a number of our nation’s founders, perceives virtuous Christianity as an ally in upholding secular democracy. But there is a problem: white evangelicalism has devolved into “a divisive, fearful, partisan, and un-Christ like version of Christianity,” a “Sharp Christianity.” Minus pretensions that “character matters,” having a “political rather than religious identity” and consumed with a “battlefield mindset,” Sharp Christianity has “lost Christianity” and thus become toxic to democracy and Christianity alike.
Still, he argues, church-state separation does not preclude a necessary role of religion — and in particular Christianity — in “stabilizing republican government.” Observing that a new “wall of separation” has emerged “between Christians’ personal and political behavior,” Rauch hopes Christianity can be redeemed and brought back into alignment with democracy. He calls secularists “to hold the church accountable to democracy of which it is part” and to hold the church “accountable for the choices it makes.”
Rauch’s solution is a “Thick Christianity” with strong faith commitment, yet supportive of constitutional church-state separation — a joining of “Jesus and James Madison,” Madison having “put compromise at the heart of the Constitution.” Rather than Sharp Christianity ripping apart the Constitution and assuming political authority, Rauch suggests a compromise between Church and Constitution that — borrowing words from Dallin Oaks, formerly a lawyer and now a top leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — “is balanced legally and negotiated politically” so that the rights of both are upheld.
Rauch reaches for a “scriptural foundation for Madison pluralism” in which religious persons remain committed to their respective doctrines while simultaneously granting equal rights to others — “a proper civic Christian theology” of gentleness breaking the “wall of separation between personal and civic formation.”
Whether this is attainable at large remains to be seen.