John Adams and the Establishment Clause

Discussions of the Establishment Clause often focus on Jefferson or Madison, but Adams should not be ignored here. His concern was that religion prospered when unencumbered by state connection. Leon Wieseltier has an article in The New Republic in which he argues the Adamsian line. Here is the money quote, "I had come to witness a disputation between religion's enemies and religion's friends. What I saw instead, with the exception of a single comment by Justice Souter, was a disputation between religion's enemies, liberal and conservative. And this confirmed me in my conviction that the surest way to steal the meaning, and therefore the power, from religion is to deliver it to politics, to enslave it to public life."