Who coined phrase wall of separation of church and state in 1644?

Answer 1

Thomas Jefferson coined the phrase "wall of separation between Church and State."

Some people attribute the quote to Roger Williams, founder of the state of Rhode Island; however, the phrase does not appear in Williams' writing. Williams may have been the first person to articulate the concept, but the actual phrase is derived from a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to members of the Danbury Baptists in 1802.

President Jefferson was responding to a group of Christians who were concerned that the government may abridge their rights in favor of the dominant Congregationalist church. These fears had their origin in the British adoption of an official state religion, under which many smaller groups suffered persecution in the 18th century and earlier.

Jefferson, in framing his answer, may have been inspired by the content of Roger Williams' 1644 book, The Bloody Tenent of Persecution (which repeated the words of a 1640 letter he had written to a "Mr Cotton"):

"When they [the Church] have opened a gap in the hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world, God hath ever broke down the wall itself, removed the Candlestick, etc., and made His Garden a wilderness as it is this day. And that therefore if He will ever please to restore His garden and Paradise again, it must of necessity be walled in peculiarly unto Himself from the world, and all that be saved out of the world are to be transplanted out of the wilderness of the World."

In his letter to the Danbury Baptists, Thomas Jeffersonwrote:

"Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his god, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which 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 and State. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties."

The phrase "wall of separation between church and state" is not in the Constitution. The First Amendment Establishment Clause comes closest to directly erecting a wall of separation between church and state.