Observed annually on October 28, Separation of Church and State Day commemorates the most revolutionary democratic principle of modern constitutional governance: that government authority must remain neutral in matters of religious dogma, and that religious conscience must remain forever protected from state coercion.
1. Roger Williams: The 1636 Rhode Island Sanctuary
A century before the American Revolution, theologian and dissident Roger Williams was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for preaching that the magistrate's power extends only to the bodies and goods of subjects, not their souls. In 1636, Williams purchased land from the Narragansett tribe and founded Providence, Rhode Island—the first civil commonwealth in human history founded on absolute religious freedom and separation of religious dogma from civil government. Williams famously coined the phrase "the hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world."
2. The US Constitution and the First Amendment
Williams's Rhode Island experiment directly inspired Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. In 1786, Virginia passed Jefferson's Statute for Religious Freedom. In 1791, the First Amendment to the United States Constitution codified this dual protection: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."
