The Fourth is for the faithless

Today marks 250 years since the Declaration of Independence was ratified. 

The current regime commemorates this occasion with prayer and patriotic platitudes. On their Freedom Trucks, AI-generated George Washingtons proclaim, “Our rights are a gift from God,” a sentiment he never uttered, let alone believed. 

A week ago, Trump’s “Religious Liberty Commission” declared there is no wall separating church and state. The same day, the Texas State Board of Education mandated that public school students read from the Bible.

This isn’t the religious liberty our Founders envisioned and enshrined into law. It’s revisionism. A White Christian Nationalist framework to establish a theocracy where our rights are no longer based on the Constitution but on one’s religious constitution.  

So, today, in celebration of the Fourth and in honor of the “confirmed infidel” and “howling atheist” who penned our Declaration, let’s consider Thomas Jefferson’s actual words: 

“It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

“Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than our opinions in physics or geometry.”

“No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever.”

“Question with boldness even the existence of a God…”

“…in answer to [the] question why the Ten Commandments should not now be a part of the common law of England we may say they are not because they never were.” 

Jefferson’s belief in the absolute separation of church and state was neither incidental nor isolated to a single letter. And that conviction didn’t end with Jefferson. It was carried forward and codified into law by James Madison, the Father of our Constitution, whose own writings make clear he, too, would have regarded the Religious Liberty Commission’s policy recommendations as an affront to the First Amendment.

In Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments, Madison rejected public funds for parochial schools: 

“…the Bill implies either that the Civil Magistrate is a competent Judge of Religious Truth; or that he may employ Religion as an engine of Civil policy. The first is an arrogant pretension falsified by the contradictory opinions of Rulers in all ages, and throughout the world: the second an unhallowed perversion of the means of salvation…”

Madison vetoed legislation that would have directed public funds to religious institutions, warning against the precedent of government entanglement with sectarian causes. And he was extremely explicit about chaplains: 

“The Constitution of the U.S. forbids everything like an establishment of a national religion… The establishment of the chaplainship to [Congress] is a palpable violation of equal rights, as well as of Constitutional principles…” 

And on the consequences of entangling religion and government: 

“During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.”

America’s Founders did not write in riddles. And yet we have moved beyond reinterpretation into a more deliberate and dangerous revisionism.

White Christian Nationalists insist that separation is a myth, neutrality is hostility, and liberty belongs only to believers. Their version of our nation’s history requires amnesia — on stripping Jefferson and Madison of their actual arguments and replacing them with something more politically convenient. 

Church-state separation was not an offhand remark. It was central to the Founders’ constitutional philosophy: that the government has no authority over conscience and no competence in matters of belief.

The Fourth belongs to those of us who defend that line against those who would dismantle it.

In solidarity,

Nick Fish
President