A Page of History Is Worth a Volume of Logic: Charting the Legal Pilgrimage of Public Religion 

Abstract

The civic catechism and canticles of our day still celebrate Thomas Jefferson’s experiment in religious liberty. To end a millennium of repressive religious establishments, we are taught, Jefferson sought liberty in the twin formulas of privatizing religion and secularizing politics. But “[a] page of history is worth a volume of logic,” Olliver Wendell Holmes once said, and careful historical work in the past two decades has begun to call a good deal of popular Jeffersonian logic on religious liberty into question. Not only are Jefferson’s views on disestablishment and free exercise considerably more delphic than once imagined, but the fuller account now available of the genesis and exodus of the American experiment in religious liberty suggests that Jeferson’s views were hardly conventional in his own day, or in the century to follow.

Here, I revisit Jefferson’s model of religious liberty, now viewed in juxtaposition with the model of religious liberty developed by John Adams, his life-long friendly rival. It was Adam’s model, more than Jefferson’s, I argue, that dominated American constitutional law for the first 150 years of the republic. It was Jefferson’s model that the Supreme Court revived in the 1940s to overcome the abuses and limitations that Adam’s model had betrayed. Neither model standing alone is adequate, but the insights of both can be combined into a new understand of the freedom of public religion. 

Keywords: Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Church-State Relations, First Amendment, Establishment, Religious Liberty, Free Exercise, Public Religion, Secularization