In Nancy Thoerig’s recent letter (“O’Reilly addressed public square free-for-all,” Dec. 24), she asserted that Thomas Jefferson in 1802 “coined” the phrase “the wall of separation between church and state.” She’s wrong.

The separation metaphor was first used in 1644 by Baptist minister Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island and adamant defender of the rights of conscience, who wrote of a “hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world.” Both Jefferson and Williams believed that keeping church and state separate would best protect religious liberty, and they were right.

Ms. Thoerig also erred in her interpretation of the First Amendment, which she contends requires the state to “accommodate all religions.” To the contrary, the role of the state under the First Amendment is not to accommodate every religion but to be neutral toward all. As a positive consequence of this neutrality, government can choose neither to advantage nor to disadvantage any religious belief. Indeed, government’s sole task in the religious realm is simply to maintain a level playing field so that individual believers holding diverse convictions may challenge one another without official or majoritarian interference. The greater the distance between church and state (i.e., the higher the wall), the greater our religious liberty.

“Civility” is apparently a virtue ranking high in Ms. Thoerig’s value system. Given our nation’s vast range of religious viewpoints, I would suggest that civility is best preserved when the government minds its own secular business, not when it breaches the wall of separation by giving my tax dollars to “faith-based” organizations affiliated with, for example, Pat Robertson, an un-American theocrat who is no friend of freedom.

Brad Taylor

Keyser, W.Va.