History has a funny way of getting twisted by people who weren’t there to live it. The most dangerous distortions are the ones that have had centuries to fester. So lets take a look at the Danbury Baptists.

Picture Connecticut in October of 1801. The Congregational Church, the old Puritan establishment, is the official religion of the state, and it will remain so until 1818.

If you are a Baptist, a Methodist, or an Episcopalian, you must petition the local justice of the peace for a certificate to worship separately and that justice can refuse you.

Your taxes still flow to the Congregational coffers. You are, in every civic sense that matters, a second-class citizen.

The Danbury Baptist Association, representing twenty-six churches in western Connecticut, is living under this regime, and they’re getting nervous.

They aren’t sitting around worrying that the Church is going to take over the federal government. They are terrified that the government…state and, potentially, federal is going to crush their way of worship.

They needed to know that the heavy hand of the federal magistrate wasn’t coming for their altars.

So they write to President Thomas Jefferson and he writes back on January 1, 1802. He agrees with them and paraphrases the First Amendment, telling them that the American people had declared “that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’” thus building “a wall of separation between Church & State.”

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Modern secularists love that phrase They’d hang it like a neon sign over every courthouse and school board meeting in America if they could.

But they have the nature of it completely backwards.

Jefferson wasn’t building a prison to keep God out of the public square. He was building a fortress to keep the State out of the sanctuary. It’s a shield for the Church, not a muzzle.

Now, the left will protest that this letter was no private musing, and on that narrow point, they are correct. Jefferson drafted his reply in consultation with two Cabinet members, Attorney General Levi Lincoln and Postmaster General Gideon Granger, and the letter was published in newspapers across the country.

He intended it to be a political statement. Fine. Lets take it as a political statement. What does it actually say? It says that the wall protects the citizen from the government.

Every clause in that letter places the restraint on the magistrate, not on the minister.

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The First Amendment is a negative right. It doesn’t tell you what you can do; it tells the government what it can’t do. It’s a chain on the wrist of the State.

When the founders wrote those words, they were acknowledging that power seeks to devour, and the conscience must be guarded against the appetite of kings.

By twisting Jefferson’s letter to mean that religious expression must be scrubbed from public life, the modern Left is actually doing the very thing the Danbury Baptists feared…using the state to dictate the terms of our existence.

The Congregational establishment of Connecticut taxed dissenters and denied them full civic standing. Today the mechanism is different, cultural pressure, legal threats, and administrative exclusion…but the coercion is still the same.

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For those of us walking the narrow path, this goes deeper than constitutional law.

We don’t demand religious liberty just because it’s written on parchment. We demand it because coerced faith is spiritually dead. God is the ultimate author of liberty. Go back to Genesis.

When God placed Adam in the Garden, He placed the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil right there in the middle. He didn’t put a high-voltage fence around it. He didn’t strip Adam of the ability to rebel.

If God wanted a world of automatons, He would have created robots, not people with the gift of free will and the dignity to choose. As it says in 2 Corinthians 3:17, “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.”

A government that tries to force religion… or force the absence of it… is acting against the nature of God Himself.

Any ruler who exceeds his mandate and reaches into the domain of the soul has ceased to govern and begun to tyrannize.

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The wall exists to ensure that when we say “Yes” to God, it’s our own voice speaking.

It ensures that our worship is an offering and that we come to God as servants…not slaves

We fight for this wall not to hide from the world, but to keep the world from corrupting the sacred space where man meets his Maker.

We must tear down the myth and rebuild the wall as it was intended: a rampart against tyranny, ensuring that the State remains the servant…

and God remains the King.