As you know better than me, the phrase “wall of separation” appears nowhere in the Constitution and still less in the Bill of Rights. Rather, it originates in an 1802 letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote to the Danbury (CT) Baptist Association whose members had written to him complaining that their religious freedom and rights of conscience were eclipsed by the established church in Connecticut, the Congregationalist Church (which would remain the established Church in CT until 1819).














