Joe Bob Briggs writes:
There are people in the United States who want us to be more like France—they want us to start banning any religious influence from anything remotely related to government—and they always cite Thomas Jefferson’s 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists, which first used the words “wall of separation between Church & State.” What they forget is that Jefferson was saying this in order to reassure the Baptists that they would have a place in the public arena just like everyone else, and that the state would never interfere with their traditions. He said something similar two years later after he bought the Louisiana territories from Napoleon and the Ursuline nuns in New Orleans became panicked that all their property would be taken away by a mostly Protestant country, or that they would be forced to alter their forms of worship.
