I want to tell you about a letter almost nobody has actually read.
Everybody quotes it. You've probably said the phrase yourself. Separation of church and state. It gets tossed around like it's sitting right there in the Constitution next to freedom of speech. It isn't. It never was. That phrase comes from one letter, written by one president, to one small group of Baptist churches up in Connecticut, my home state, back in 1802.
Here's what usually gets left out of the story. Those Baptists weren't worried about too much religion in government. They were worried about the opposite. Connecticut still had an official state church at the time, and if you weren't part of it, you knew you were the minority. So they wrote to Thomas Jefferson, and he wrote back something that would outlive every headline of his presidency, that the First Amendment was building a wall of separation between church and state.
Read that letter in context and the wall only runs one direction. Jefferson was telling a nervous group of churches, relax, the federal government has no business reaching over this wall into your sanctuary. He never told the church to stay out of government's business. He told government to stay out of the church's.
Somewhere along the way we flipped it.
Four Rulings, Sixty Years
I walked through this in detail on the show, so I won't repeat the whole thing here, but the shape of it matters. 1962, prayer removed from public schools. 1963, Bible reading right behind it. 1973, the right to life redefined. 1980, the Ten Commandments pulled off classroom walls in Kentucky. 2015, marriage itself rewritten. Sixty years, and every single one of those moments took a question that used to belong to families and churches and moved it into a courtroom instead.
Proverbs 14:34 says it plainly. Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin condemns any people. That's not a bumper sticker. That's a warning that's been sitting there for three thousand years, and it has aged a lot better than most of what the courts have handed down since 1962.
What's Happening in Texas Right Now
Texas passed a law, Senate Bill 10, requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in every public school classroom. A group of families sued. The case is Cribbs Ringer v. Comal Independent School District, and it's headed to the Supreme Court right now.
I'll give you the honest version of both sides, because that's what I owe you even when I've already made up my mind. Texas says the Commandments aren't just religious text, they're foundational to the whole idea of an oath, a courtroom, common law itself. The families suing say this isn't about whether the Commandments have value, it's about the government picking one specific translation and forcing it into every classroom.
Here's the detail that stopped me. Some of those families are Christian. Some are Jewish. And I have a hard time getting past that. If the objection is about a state-picked Protestant translation being forced on a Jewish family's kids, fine, that's a real legal argument. But when the argument turns into saying the Commandments themselves shouldn't be visible to a child, that's not a legal objection anymore. That's arguing against the moral law itself. And when it comes from someone who claims Moses came down that mountain for them too, I have one question. Do you believe God gave that law, or don't you?
Key Takeaways
- The "wall of separation" only ran one direction. Jefferson's 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists promised government would stay out of the church, not the reverse.
- Four rulings, sixty years. Engel v. Vitale (1962), Roe v. Wade (1973), Stone v. Graham (1980), and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) each moved a moral question out of communities and into a courtroom.
- SB10 is now before the Supreme Court. Cribbs Ringer v. Comal ISD tests whether Texas classrooms can display the Ten Commandments.
- The Supreme Court's own building carries Moses holding the tablets, carved into both its east pediment and its courtroom frieze.
One More Thing
Walk into the Supreme Court building itself, the same building that will decide this case, and Moses is staring back at you. He's carved into the building's east side holding the tablets. He's carved into the courtroom wall behind the bench holding them again. You cannot put Moses on the wall holding the Ten Commandments and then turn around and say those same Commandments have no legitimate purpose in a public building. Either the symbol means something, or it doesn't.
A courtroom can rule on a classroom wall. It can't rule on the moral law itself.
Jefferson never asked this country to forget God. He asked it to keep government's hands off the conscience of every believer. We're the ones who confused that promise with permission to erase Him. That one was settled a long time before the first gavel ever fell.
Conclusion
Give the full episode a listen wherever you get your podcasts, and let me know where you land on this one.