If this conclusion about the sanctity of religious liberty calls to mind one of the most famous metaphors in American political and constitutional thought—"a wall of separation between church and state"—it is not because of the weight Jefferson himself placed upon the metaphor. Rather, the phrase, used by Jefferson in a letter in 1802, was freighted with enormous political and constitutional significance by the Supreme Court, which in the 1947 case Everson v. Board of Education transformed it into constitutional law.
