The endorsement test is often invoked in religious display cases. In McCreary County v. American Civil Liberties Union , the Court ruled that the display of the Ten Commandments in two Kentucky courtrooms was unconstitutional but refused in the companion case, Van Orden v.
Perry , to require the removal of a long-standing monument to the Ten Commandments on the grounds of the Texas State Capitol. Questions involving appropriate use of government funds are increasingly subject to the neutrality test , which requires the government to treat religious groups the same as it would any other similarly situated group. In his opinion for the majority, Chief Justice William H. From the colonial era to the present, religions and religious beliefs have played a significant role in the political life of the United States.
As religious diversity continues to grow, concerns about separation of church and state are likely to continue. This article was originally published in Mark Alcorn is a high school and college history instructor in Minnesota. Hana M. Dresisbach, Daniel L. Miller, William Lee. Washington, D. Ryman and J. Mark Alcorn. Establishment Clause Separation of Church and State [electronic resource]. Few Americans would have tolerated a coercive central government infringing on their rights to post religious symbols on local schools, courts or anywhere else.
Americans built society from the ground up. Many had fled oppression. The colonies instituted local self-government indigenously to confirm the rights resident in their persons and property. Few would have willingly been dispossessed by Washington of the very freedoms which they had just secured from London.
Here men could and did rise as their efforts merited. Commoners were unshackled from feudal paralysis and freed to find God individually. Both the economy and church thrived. Alexis de Tocqueville observed that Americans intertwined individual liberty with vibrant faith. Even non-Christian founders thought religion essential. None would have wished to upend the very basis for education, law or culture.
Americans understood freedom without morality quickly devolves into debauchery. Whether from sincere faith, or, prudence instilling an honest, law-abiding, responsible and hardworking populace, all esteemed biblical morality as the bedrock of self government. In the Everson v. Thomas Jefferson thought differently. The Danbury Baptists wrote to him congratulating his election and objecting to the First Amendment.
Jefferson agreed. As he expressed, what communities did and how they worshipped were not federal affairs. Freedom of religion was partly moral — protecting our most cherished liberty — and partly pragmatic. Religious animosity tears society asunder, particularly when church is affixed to government.
With freedom of conscience assured, conflict becomes less likely. The First Amendment was an insightful compromise between church and state, federal and local authorities. The framers desired to avoid the controversies which engulfed Europe. A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points,. Thus the Constitution decreed that Washington had no occasion or authority to interject itself into matters as obviously local as doctrines of faith.
When the Supreme Court ruled that prescribed prayers did not belong in public schools, a firestorm of criticism erupted, challenging the decision and spurring a decades-long debate that continues today. The s were a tense decade for Americans. Freedom and security remained at risk a few short years after the defeat of Hitler.
One response to this threat was to elevate the public role of religion. In New York the state board of regents, which was responsible for public education, reflected the national mood by crafting a nondenominational prayer for schoolchildren to recite each morning. Roth was a manufacturing executive who was actively involved in a local committee for better schools. He also was Jewish, and although not observant personally, he was bothered by Christian symbols in the school his son attended.
Children could sit quietly or leave the room, if parents provided an excuse. Board members, who earlier had refused to allow a discussion of Hanukkah during the Christmas season, could not see the problem.
The prayer was ecumenical—it included all religions—so who could object? In taking the case, the NYCLU asked Roth to find other individuals who were upset by the practice and who would become plaintiffs with him. Although he located more than fifty families who responded, in the end only five people withstood community pressure and joined the lawsuit. Like the other litigants, he believed that religious instruction was the responsibility of parents, not the duty of the state.
Public sentiment mounted against Roth and the other plaintiffs. Opponents claimed they were anti-Christian, even anti-God, and accused them of being unpatriotic. All five families received sacks of hate mail, snubs from friends, and threats of various sorts, from unemployment to arson and child kidnapping. After losing in state courts, Roth, Engel, and the other petitioners appealed to the U.
Supreme Court. Their argument before the high bench was straightforward: the state, by composing its own prayer for an institution with compulsory attendance, was engaged in an establishment of religion. The justices agreed. Justice Hugo Black rejected the view that the decision was anti-religion or anti-prayer. A deafening protest greeted the decision in Engel v.
States in the Bible Belt sought to defy the ruling by allowing teachers to decide whether to pray or not, a practice later ruled illegal. The controversy did not fade quickly, as the plaintiffs soon discovered. Not all the threats were idle. The debate over government and religion continues today, even though the Supreme Court has hewed close to its position in Engel v.
Subsequent decisions have stoked the fires of protest. Other cases forbade public schools from endorsing a religious practice or belief, teaching theology or creationism, displaying the Ten Commandments or Bible verses, or using the facilities of religious schools or the services of religious officials. In , a threefold test emerged in Lemon v. Kurtzman to gauge whether a law concerning religion was constitutional: Did it have a secular, or nonreligious, purpose?
Did the law neither advance nor inhibit religion? Did it foster or encourage no excessive entanglement between church and state? If the answer to each of these questions was yes, then the law was constitutional; answering no to any of them cast doubt on the measure. More recently, the Court has relaxed this standard somewhat to allow laws that affect religious activity but are religiously neutral in their language, intent, and application. Church groups, for example, can use school facilities on an equal basis with nonreligious groups, and states can provide remedial or disability services to students in religious and public schools alike.
Still, the basic principle remains: government must be strictly neutral on questions of religion; faith and belief are matters for the individual conscience alone. This stance continues to cause unease among people who think government should promote morality. With the exception of Ireland, the United States is the most religious society in the Western world, with nearly 90 percent of Americans identifying themselves as religious believers, so why must government remain strictly neutral?
Most people who make this argument do not seek an established church, but they desire public policies that foster religious beliefs, regardless of denomination. I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute—where no Catholic prelate would tell the President should he be Catholic how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote—where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference—and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.
Some would go further, advocating that government should enshrine traditional, largely Protestant, values in laws governing moral choices. First, the statute must have a secular legislative purpose; second, its principal or primary effect must be one that neither advances nor inhibits religion.
Even though government support of religion generally might sound appealing, especially in times of unsettling social change, many strongly religious people oppose any level of government involvement.
We are too diverse in our religious beliefs, they argue, to make this approach practical, even if it could be done constitutionally. They also note that the separation of church and state is responsible for the vitality of religion in the United States. Without an established faith, denominations and creeds compete with each other for membership, thus increasing the public presence of religion.
Not everyone accepts this conclusion. Some groups claim that a strict separation of church and state has resulted in hostility, not neutrality, toward religion.
They want government to take positive steps to ensure that religious groups are not excluded from government funding solely because they are religious. In a case from , for example, a question arose from the University of Virginia, founded by Thomas Jefferson: could a public university refuse to spend student-fee monies to support a magazine that advocated an evangelical Christian point of view, when this funding was available to support a wide range of other student publications, including some antagonistic to religion?
In Rosenberger v. University of Virginia , the Supreme Court, by a 5-to-4 vote, ruled that the establishment clause did not bar the support as long as the distribution of funds was neutral and evenhanded, even though the magazine promoted a particular religious message.
More recently, President George W. A religious group that receives these monies may not require participants to accept its beliefs and it cannot force them to join worship, but neither does it have to hide its religious convictions.
The modern debate about the meaning and purpose of the separation of church and state is dressed in new language, but it fundamentally is the same debate we have had since the adoption of the First Amendment.
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