Jefferson, Texas textbooks, and the “wall of separation”
The earliest treatment of the topic in the excerpts comes from a “Best of” episode on history education. Bob Zadek described a decision by what he called the conservative Texas textbook writing commission to excise Thomas Jefferson as a founding political philosopher, noting that Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, wrote the Virginia Declaration of Religious Freedom, was a scholar of the revolutionary era, was the third president, and was the first Secretary of State. Best of: Changing the Face of History (2010)
Zadek attributed the excision to Jefferson’s religious writings. He said Jefferson wrote a letter to a Baptist minister discussing the separation of church and state, and that in it Jefferson wrote the phrase “a wall of separation between church and state.” Zadek characterized that phrase as Jefferson’s interpretation of the Bill of Rights, written in private correspondence. In Zadek’s account, the textbook commissioners concluded that Jefferson did not sufficiently embrace the church and therefore excised him as a founding philosopher. Zadek framed the episode as revisionism and asked whether elected officials should decide what counts as history. Best of: Changing the Face of History (2010)
The excerpt does not name the letter, the minister, the commission, or any legal holding; it presents the phrase only as Jefferson’s private interpretation, relayed by Zadek.
Vouchers and public funding of religious institutions
In a 2014 episode, John Rothmann invoked the doctrine directly while arguing against school vouchers. Rothmann said he believes in a firm separation of church and state, and that the minute one gets into the voucher question, religious institutions have the opportunity to receive public funding. He noted that private religious institutions, Catholic schools in particular, have pushed hard for vouchers, and that the measure was put on the state ballot three times and rejected by California voters each time. Aren’t Men Entitled to Due Process on Campus? (2014)
Rothmann’s argument tied the church-state principle to specific fiscal claims. He said Lamar Alexander was proposing $2,100 for those who meet the requirement, and that if Alexander’s bill passed the Senate it would cost $24 billion, which he described as 41% of current federal spending at the elementary and secondary level. He argued that taking that money away would gut public education and limit rather than expand choice. He also cited his own credentials — a Master of Arts in teaching, a secondary teaching credential from California, and 40 years as president of the Washington High School Alumni Association — as the basis for saying he had researched and battled the voucher propositions. Aren’t Men Entitled to Due Process on Campus? (2014)
Bob Zadek’s role in the exchange was to press the market-competition case for private education. He proposed deleting the word “public” from the proposition that public education is important, and argued that in a competitive environment the marketplace is the best determiner of what is best. Rothmann called that position rubbish and illogical. The excerpt does not record Zadek responding to Rothmann’s church-state point directly; the two men argued past each other on whether competition or funding levels determine school quality. Aren’t Men Entitled to Due Process on Campus? (2014)
“Separation of race and state” as an analogy
The most sustained engagement with the concept comes from two 2022 episodes featuring David Bernstein, author of Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America. In both episodes Bernstein used the church-state settlement as an explicit model for what he called a “separation of race and state.” 5 Questions for David Bernstein on Racial Classification (2022)
Bernstein’s formulation was that the target should be the widespread separation of race and state, and that the United States has more or less a separation of church and state in the sense that the government does not favor or classify people by religion — there is no official government tally of who is Mormon, Jewish, Catholic, evangelical Protestant, or Muslim. He argued the same should generally hold for race, with a limited exception: certain civil rights laws that cannot be enforced without statistical evidence may require classifications, and absent that, he said, one has to do the best one can with them or repeal the laws. 5 Questions for David Bernstein on Racial Classification (2022)
Bernstein’s reasons for the analogy were consequentialist. He said separation of church and state exists because it is extremely dangerous and unproductive for the government to classify people by religion, potentially give out goodies, and thereby produce societal tension, prevent assimilation, and encourage over-identification with sectarianism. For exactly the same reasons, he said, government should be discouraged from creating official racial identity. He distinguished government classification from private and voluntary uses of religion or race: just as people may hold their own religious values and a project may seek a Mormon perspective, race could be taken into account informally and voluntarily, without the government deciding which classifications to use and distributing benefits and harms on that basis. 5 Questions for David Bernstein on Racial Classification (2022)
In the second Bernstein episode, the same conclusion was delivered in nearly identical language, again framing separation of race and state as the goal and the church-state settlement as the analogy. Exploring the Borderlands of Legal Whiteness with David Bernstein (2022) That episode’s distinctive contribution was on perceived identity: Bernstein said the rules against discrimination protect people based on perceived identity regardless of actual identity, and cited a case in which someone who had converted to Christianity, and whose parents may also have been converts, was held protected because the discriminator said he did not care about the conversion — the person was still a Jew to him. Exploring the Borderlands of Legal Whiteness with David Bernstein (2022)
Across episodes
The topic appears in four episodes spanning 2010 to 2022, and the excerpts show no development in the doctrine itself — no case, statute, or amendment is named in any of them. What changes is the use to which the phrase is put. In the 2010 episode Zadek invokes Jefferson’s “wall of separation” as the reason Texas commissioners excised Jefferson from the founding-philosopher list. In 2014 Rothmann invokes a firm separation of church and state as a reason to reject vouchers that would send public money to religious schools. In the two 2022 episodes Bernstein invokes the church-state settlement as a template for a separation of race and state. The earlier treatments treat the phrase as a settled background principle whose violation is the scandal; Bernstein treats it as a working model to be extended to a new domain.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts never identify the letter Jefferson wrote, the Baptist minister he addressed, the Texas commission by name, or any court decision construing the Establishment Clause. No speaker states which amendment or amendments the doctrine rests on, and no excerpt describes what any case held. The 2014 excerpt breaks off mid-exchange, and the 2010 excerpt ends at a section heading, so neither records how the argument concluded.