“And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, . . . set up the tabernacle of the tent of the congregation. . . . put therein the ark of the testimony . . . bring in the candlestick, and light the lamps thereof.” No, I am not going to preach a Puritan sermon to you. I want only to remind you of the Puritan in Roger Williams who said the words that provide the title of the book under consideration. The words come from Williams's debate with John Cotton over church government: “When they [or the those who desired to Christianize the world through the use of worldly power] have opened a gap in the hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world, God had ever broke down the wall itself, removed the candlestick, and made His garden a wilderness.” For Mark deWolfe Howe, Williams's “theological wall of separation” represents the evangelical impulse in American religion and is an important source for understanding American law concerning church and state. A key contribution of Howe's monograph was to remind its readers that not only Jefferson's sense of natural law and individual rights but also Williams's congregational and biblical notions informed the First Amendment religion clauses. Howe finds fault with the Supreme Court's ignoring this dual lineage and favoring only Jefferson's Enlightenment view. For Howe, the modern Court's use of Jefferson's language to impute due process values to the religion clauses “distorts their manifest objectives” to grant religion constitutionally protected status—a status distinct from other forms of conscience, not least irreligion. These other forms of conscience are, he argues, protected by other constitutional guarantees, such as speech, press, and association.

The argument of Mark deWolfe Howe's The Garden and the Wilderness turned on the contrast Howe drew between two uses of a single phrase: “wall of separation.” Thomas Jefferson used the phrase in 1802, in a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association: “I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between church and state.” More than a century and a half earlier, in 1644, the colonial advocate of religious freedom Roger Williams had employed the same phrase in a letter to his theological opponent, the Reverend John Cotton of Boston. According to Williams's reading of the Bible, the people of God—Jews and Christians—were “separate from the world,” and, “when they have opened a gap in the hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world, God hath ever broke down the wall itself, removed the candlestick, and made His garden a wilderness, as at this day. And that therefore if He will ever please to restore His garden and paradise again, it must of necessity be walled in peculiarly unto Himself from the world; and that all that shall be saved out of the world are to be transplanted out of the wilderness of the world, and added unto his church or garden.”

In history, perspective is everything. Given that, I should make it clear from the start that I approached Mark deWolfe Howe's history of the First Amendment and church–state relations as a historian who studies constitutions and constitution-making, and more specifically as a historian of constitutions who has written about how and why we do constitutional history. Viewing it from that perspective, I must admit I have mixed feelings about this book.