From Theocracy To Non secular Liberty: Connecticut’s Journey from Thomas Jefferson’s “Wall of Separation” Letter to a State Structure, as Advised Via the Newspapers of the Time

“Proper-wing theocracy was defeated in America — 200 years in the past, in a narrative with startling parallels to our time … What a narrative it’s! It is a story of two clashing partisan identities that is strikingly just like our world at the moment … It is a supply of inspiration and instruction for all of us within the midst of our personal very darkish time.” — Salon.com

Ebook Description:

One occasion had been the conservatives, the occasion that believed the wealthy ought to rule, feared that extra folks with the ability to vote would put them out of energy, regarded immigrants with contempt, and hypocritically boasted of getting “all the faith.” Their clergy preached that it was a spiritual obligation to vote for this occasion. They raised alarms that faith was at risk from the opposite occasion, and claimed that this different occasion would even attempt to undermine the establishment of marriage. They unfold a plethora of the craziest conspiracy theories, and predicted that each one method of anarchy and vice would consequence if the opposite occasion obtained into energy, proclaiming themselves the occasion of regulation and order. No, not at the moment’s Republicans; however the Federalist occasion of the early 1800s in New England, and significantly of their stronghold of Connecticut.

On January 1, 1802, Thomas Jefferson wrote his now-famous letter to the Danbury, Connecticut Baptists, during which he coined the phrase “separation between church and state.”

Jefferson was replying to an deal with from the Danbury Baptist Affiliation during which the Baptists, after congratulating him on his election to the presidency, informed him of the oppression they confronted as a dissenting sect beneath the Congregationalist-Presbyterian theocracy of their state.

It will be one other fifteen years earlier than Jefferson, upon listening to of the Republican victory within the 1817 Connecticut election, would write to John Adams:

“I be a part of you subsequently in honest congratulations that this den of the priesthood is at size damaged up, and {that a} protestant popedom is not to shame the American historical past and character.”

This guide, by newspaper articles from the time (together with a lot political poetry and satire), tells the story of the decade-and-a-half-long battle of Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans to overthrow the Federalists and remodel Connecticut from a “protestant popedom,” as Jefferson put it, right into a state with a structure that assured spiritual freedom.