A Wall of Separation: Church, State & the American Experiment
Thomas Jefferson borrowed the phrase from a persecuted Baptist: 'a wall of separation between Church & State.' For 250 years Americans have fought over what it means — and whether it should stand at all. This 14-part ReThink History series traces the doctrine of church-state separation from its colonial roots through the Supreme Court cases that built it, the political realignment that turned faith into a voting bloc, and the funding fights now testing the wall in real time: Roger Williams and the garden of the church; Madison, Jefferson, and the First Amendment; the day prayer left the public classroom; the rise and fall of the Lemon test; Billy Graham, Nixon, and the great evangelical migration; Bob Jones, the IRS, and the grievance that organized the Religious Right; Falwell's Moral Majority and Robertson's 700 Club; Promise Keepers; the school-choice revolution that turned 'no aid to religion' into 'no exclusion of religion'; Alaska's homeschool allotments; how Liberty University was built into a machine for training a governing class; and the new claim, from a rising movement, that the separation was never real — 'a fabrication.' We test one question without shouting it: is the wall being lowered in ways that threaten a pluralist democracy, or is this an overdue correction to a metaphor read too broadly? We give the strongest version of both answers and let the record argue. A measured, sourced deep dive, narrated by AI voices from human-reviewed research. © 2026 Selway Solutions LLC · <a href="https://history.selwaysolutions.io/index.html#license">Educational & Institutional Use License</a> · <a href="mailto:nick@selwaysolutions.io">Contact</a>
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Episodes
Is Separation of Church and State a 'Fabrication'? Christian Nationalism Today
The newest move isn't to lower the wall but to deny it ever existed.
How Liberty University Became a Political Machine
Jerry Falwell built a movement — and something more durable: a university.
Alaska's Fight Over Public Money for Religious Schools
The live test case for the whole national fight.
How Religious Schools Won Public Funding: Trinity Lutheran, Espinoza, Carson
In twenty years the Supreme Court flipped the rule on public money and religion — from 'no aid' to 'no exclusion.' Zelman, Trinity Lutheran, Espinoza, Carson v.
Promise Keepers: The 1990s Movement That Filled Stadiums With Men
Hundreds of thousands of men packed stadiums to weep, pray, and make promises.
Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and the Rise of the Moral Majority
How scattered churchgoers became a voting bloc.
How the IRS — Not Abortion — Sparked the Religious Right
Many historians argue the movement's real spark was the IRS moving against segregated Christian schools' tax exemptions.
How White Evangelicals Moved From Democrat to Republican
Not a single flip but a slow migration: Cold War anti-communism, the Democrats' embrace of civil rights and the 1948 Dixiecrat revolt, and Nixon's Southern Strategy.
The Lemon Test: The Rule That Governed Church and State for 50 Years
One three-part test decided nearly every church-state case for half a century — then the Court buried it.
How School Prayer Ended: Engel v. Vitale and Abington v. Schempp
In 1962 and 1963 the Supreme Court ended official prayer and devotional Bible reading in public schools — and lit a political fire that still burns.
How the First Amendment Came to Bind Every State: Cantwell and Everson
For 150 years the First Amendment restrained only Congress.
When U.S. Public Schools Were Quietly Protestant — and Catholics Fought Back
State churches ended — and a Protestant culture took their place in the new public schools.
How Jefferson and Madison Wrote Religious Freedom Into American Law
How a principle became policy: Patrick Henry's tax for 'teachers of the Christian religion,' Madison's Memorial and Remonstrance, Jefferson's Virginia Statute, Article VI's no-religious-test clause, the First Amendment, and the 1802 Danbury letter that gave us the 'wall of separation.' Includes the originalist counterargument..
The Man Who Invented 'Separation of Church and State' — Before Jefferson
Long before Jefferson, a banished Puritan named Roger Williams argued for a 'wall of separation' — to protect the church from a corrupting world, not to keep faith out of public life.