The Supreme Court didn’t just lower the wall of separation between church and state. It flipped the wall into a funnel, and now the taxpayer pays for what Jefferson swore he’d never fund.
Thomas Jefferson cut up his Bible with a razor. He excised the miracles, the resurrection, and the water into wine, keeping only the moral teachings, because he believed a rational man had no business swallowing supernatural claims whole.
This is the man the Supreme Court now invokes, however obliquely, in justifying public money flowing into classrooms where children are taught the literal truth of those same miracles. The irony would be funny if it weren’t now the law of the land.
In 1802, Jefferson wrote a short letter to the Danbury Baptist Association of Connecticut, which became the most argued-over fan letter in American history. The Baptists were a religious minority in a state dominated by an entrenched Congregationalist establishment, and they wrote to the new president worried their religious liberties were treated as “favors granted, and not as inalienable rights.”
Jefferson’s reply was reassurance, not policy. He told them religion “is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God,” that “the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions,” and that the First Amendment had the effect of “building a wall of separation between Church & State.”
The intent is unmistakable: this was a shield for believers against government power, not an invitation for government money to find its way into a church’s collection plate. Jefferson wanted the state out of the pulpit entirely. He did not carve out an exception for the pulpit’s tuition bill.
The phrase itself never appears in the Constitution. It shows up in a private letter, two years after ratification, from a man who spent his life hostile to institutional religion and friendly to the individual conscience. That distinction is the whole ballgame, and the Court has spent the last several decades pretending not to notice it.
The unraveling started, fittingly, with the case that supposedly enshrined the wall. In Everson v. Board of Education in 1947, the Court delivered gorgeous separationist language, saying the wall must be “kept high and impregnable,” then turned around and let the state reimburse parents for bus fare to Catholic schools.
The wall was declared sacred and quietly used as a turnstile. The contradiction metastasized. In Zelman v. Simmons-Harris in 2002, the Court found that public money routed to religious schools through a voucher program was fine because parents, not the state, made the “true private choice.” Jefferson’s wall does not care about the relay. Money is money whether it passes through a parent’s hand on its way to a rectory or arrives by direct deposit.
Then came the demolition crew.
Jefferson said he had sworn “eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”
In Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue in 2020, the Court ruled that states could no longer use their own constitutions, the so-called Blaine Amendments, to keep public money out of religious schools. States wanting to be more separationist than the federal floor required were told they could not be.
In Carson v. Makin in 2022, the Court went further: Maine could not merely permit religious schools into its tuition program; it was required to fund religious instruction itself, the devotional teaching of doctrine, with tax dollars. Months later, in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, the Court finished the job, discarding the old Lemon test for a “historical practices” standard flexible enough to discover precedent for whatever the majority wants to do anyway.
Justice Sotomayor’s dissent in Carson, joined by Justice Kagan, said what needed saying. In five years, she wrote, the Court had gone from “permitting States to decline to fund religious exercise to requiring States to fund it.”
That sentence deserves to be read twice. It is not incremental drift. It is a reversal of the constitutional poles.
Sotomayor traced the historical record showing anti-establishment principles, in many founding and post-founding era states, would have flatly forbidden using public funds for religious instruction. She defended the distinction preserved by the First Circuit before the Court erased it between a school’s religious status and its religious use: a religious school could receive a neutral benefit, a bus, a lunch, a sidewalk, without an Establishment Clause problem, but public money could not pay for the specific act of teaching a child that Christ rose from the dead.
Status and use were not a technicality. They were the last coherent boundary in this corner of the law. The majority erased it, converting the Free Exercise Clause from a shield protecting believers into a sword compelling every taxpayer, believer or not, to fund somebody else’s religious instruction. Justice Breyer’s dissent made the same point differently: the Constitution, at most, permitted states to fund religious schools.
The Court now says it requires them to.
None of this happens in a neutral vacuum, whatever the majority’s “neutrality” rhetoric claims. Voucher money, in practice, flows overwhelmingly to Christian schools, because that is where the private religious school infrastructure overwhelmingly exists. A Muslim family in rural Maine will find the marketplace of “choice” considerably thinner than a Baptist or Catholic family will.
The theory is neutral. The distribution is not.
Jefferson wrote to the Danbury Baptists to protect a religious minority from a government entangled with a majority faith. The Roberts Court has taken the ashes of that letter and built the very machine he feared: a state apparatus that channels public funds into religious education, with the flow determined by who already holds the most institutional ground.
Jefferson said he had sworn “eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” He did not mean tyranny only from without. Compelling a citizen’s own tax dollars to underwrite the religious indoctrination of someone else’s child is exactly the tyranny he had in mind. The wall did not fall on its own. The Court took it apart, brick by brick, and called the demolition liberty.
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