The Inclusion of Constitutional Protection by David Barton
Therefore what religious privileges we enjoy as a minor part of the State we enjoy as favors granted, and not as inalienable rights. The inclusion of Constitutional protection for the “free exercise of religion” suggested to the Danbury Baptists that the right was government given thus alienable rather than God given hence inalienable, and that therefore the government might someday attempt to regulate religious expression. This was a possibility to which they strenuously objected unless someone’s religious practice caused him, as they explained, to “work ill to his neighbor.” Jefferson understood their concern; it was also his own. He made numerous statements declaring the inability of the government to regulate, restrict, or interfere with religious expression. For example: No power over the freedom of religion is delegated to the United States by the Constitution Kentucky Resolutions, 1798.
In matters of religion I have considered that its free exercise is placed by the Constitution independent of the powers of the general federal government Second Inaugural Address, 1805. Our excellent Constitution has not placed our religious rights under the power of any public functionary. Letter To The Methodist Episcopal Church, 1808 I consider the government of the United States as interdicted prohibited by the Constitution from intermeddling with religious institutions or exercises.
Letter To Samuel Miller, 1808 Jefferson believed that the government was to be powerless to interfere with religious expressions for a very simple reason: he had long witnessed the unhealthy tendency of government to encroach upon the free exercise of religious expression. As he explained to Noah Webster: It had become an universal and almost uncontroverted position in the several States that the purposes of society do not require a surrender of all our rights to our ordinary governors and which experience has nevertheless proved they the government will be constantly encroaching on if submitted to them; that there are also certain fences which experience has proved peculiarly efficacious effective against wrong and rarely obstructive of right, which yet the governing powers have ever shown a disposition to weaken and remove. Of the first kind, for instance, is freedom of religion.
Thomas Jefferson had no intention of allowing the government to limit, restrict, regulate, or interfere with public religious practices. He believed, along with the other Founders, that the First Amendment had been enacted only to prevent the federal establishment of a national denomination a fact he made clear in a letter to fellow signer of the Declaration of Independence Benjamin Rush.