Scholars Criticize Paper on Jefferson

A group of scholars is criticizing a Library of Congress official for what it calls an unbalanced study that minimizes Thomas Jefferson’s call for a “wall of separation” between church and state.

The paper by James H. Hutson, written for an exhibit on the history of religious freedom in America, was “quickly seized by the Christian Coalition and other religious right leaders as proof that the Founding Fathers never intended to erect a barrier between religion and government,” the scholars said in a statement this week.

The 24 scholars, led by a retired humanities professor, Robert Alley of the University of Richmond in Virginia, said they disagree with Hutson’s conclusions about the 1802 letter in which Jefferson used the “wall of separation” phrase. In the statement, they “urge library staff to refrain from presenting these conclusions as settled fact” in the exhibit.

In the letter, Jefferson, the newly elected president, was trying to explain to Baptists in Danbury, Conn., his unwillingness to issue Thanksgiving proclamations, Hutson believes.

A major point of Hutson’s study was that because Jefferson deleted from the letter a clause in which he called his duties “merely temporal,” the wall he spoke of should be seen as a political jab at his enemies. It should not be read, as it has been, as an interpretation of the Constitution, he contends.

FBI laboratory tests found that Jefferson had first written he was “confining myself to the duties of my station, which are merely temporal,” but later crossed that out. His political advisors convinced him, Hutson says, that the sentence would offend church people.

Hutson said anyone is free to draw conclusions from the letter and from the FBI’s detective work that uncovered the scribbled-out line.

“I was attempting to put the letter in context so we could explain to the public what the FBI had done,” Hutson said. “All kinds of people have drawn conclusions. We can’t dictate any of them.”

In the study, he wrote: “It will be of considerable interest in assessing the credibility of the Danbury Baptist letter as a tool of constitutional interpretation to know, as we now do, that it was written as a partisan counterpunch.”