# Presidents on the Separation of Church and State *Part of the [[Presidential Consensus Series Hub]] — five presidential-consensus collections and their modern-right ruptures.* From the first president to the forty-fourth, the American chief executive said the same thing about religion and government: that the United States is not a confessional state, that the law neither establishes a faith nor tests for one, and that religion flourishes best when kept structurally separate from the machinery of government. The phrasings are famous — Washington's "to bigotry no sanction," Jefferson's "wall of separation," Grant's "keep the church and the state forever separate," Kennedy's "absolute" — but the principle beneath them is one principle, held across two centuries and both parties. This collection gathers ten presidential statements of it, on the same logic as its companions [[Presidents on the Nation of Immigrants]], [[Presidents on the Rule of Law]], and [[Presidents on Tax Fairness]]: to fix the consensus on the record so its abandonment can be measured against the presidents' own words. The RWKB stake is sharp here, because the modern challenge is not a tweak but a counter-revolution. [[Christian Nationalism]] — in its [[Seven Mountain Mandate]] and [[Dominionism]] variants, and in the governing ambitions catalogued in the companion receipts collection [[Christian Nationalism in Government]] — holds that America was founded as a Christian nation, that the "wall of separation" is a myth, and that Christian belief is the proper qualification for and orientation of public power. Every one of those claims is contradicted, in plain language, by a president — including, pointedly, by Republican presidents. Grant, Garfield, and Theodore Roosevelt all stated the separation principle as flatly as any Founder. And the most direct rebuttal of all is an official act of the early federal government: the Senate-ratified, presidentially proclaimed declaration that the United States "is not, in any sense, founded on the [[Christian religion]]." ## The founders' settlement (1790–1819) - [[George Washington - to bigotry no sanction]] — 1790. The first president assures a Jewish congregation that the government "gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance" — toleration as a right inherent in the state, not a favor from a Christian majority. - [[John Adams - not founded on the Christian religion]] — 1797. The Treaty of Tripoli, ratified unanimously and proclaimed by President Adams, declares the U.S. government "not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion." No senator objected. - [[Thomas Jefferson - a wall of separation]] — 1802. The president gives the principle its enduring name, reading the [[First Amendment]] as "a wall of separation between Church & State." - [[James Madison - total separation of church and state]] — 1819. The Constitution's principal author reports that "the total separation of the Church from the State" strengthened both — the architect testifying to his design's results. ## The nineteenth-century imperative (1832–1881) - [[Andrew Jackson - complete separation of religion and government]] — 1832. Jackson refuses to proclaim a national day of prayer, unwilling to disturb religion's "complete separation from the political concerns of the General Government" — separation as executive self-restraint. - [[Ulysses S. Grant - keep church and state forever separate]] — 1875. A Republican war hero makes it an imperative: religion belongs to "the family altar, the church, and the private school," funded privately; "keep the church and the state forever separate." - [[James A. Garfield - absolute religious freedom]] — 1881. A Republican president restates both Religion Clauses from the inaugural platform: "absolute religious freedom," no establishment, no prohibition. ## The modern defenses (1908–2006) - [[Theodore Roosevelt - no religious test]] — 1908. Roosevelt condemns judging candidates by creed as "an outrage against … liberty of conscience," invoking Lincoln, who belonged to no church — a defense of Article VI's no-religious-test rule. - [[John F. Kennedy - separation of church and state is absolute]] — 1960. Facing a religious test in real time, Kennedy makes his faith a case for strict separation: "absolute" — no clerical control, no public funds, no test for office. - [[Barack Obama - no longer just a Christian nation]] — 2006. The pluralist premise stated as demographic fact: a nation "also … Jewish, … Muslim, … Buddhist, … Hindu, and … of nonbelievers" cannot have a state religion. ## Analytical throughline Read in sequence, these ten receipts establish a consensus remarkable for both its duration and its breadth. The settlement was not a secular-liberal imposition; it was the founders' own design, defended across the nineteenth century by Jacksonian Democrats and Gilded-Age Republicans alike, and restated in the twentieth by a Catholic Democrat fighting an anti-Catholic test. The throughline is government neutrality: the state takes no side among faiths or against them, neither establishing religion nor restricting it nor testing for it. Religion is treated as too important to entangle with state power, not too unimportant. That is what makes the contemporary [[Christian Nationalism]] project a genuine rupture rather than a policy adjustment. Its foundational historical claim — that America was established as a Christian nation — is refuted by the very generation it invokes, most flatly by the Adams-era Treaty of Tripoli. Its program — public funds and public power oriented to Christian ends, the "wall" dismissed as a fiction — is the precise inverse of what Grant, Garfield, and Roosevelt, all Republicans, said the Constitution required. Staged together, these quotes turn the modern movement's premise from a contestable interpretation into a documented departure from what presidents of both parties, for over two hundred years, said the United States was. For the governing ambitions on the other side of the wall, see the companion receipts in [[Christian Nationalism in Government]].