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Separating Church and State
| Article
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12097 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1987 |
5,859 Words |
| Author
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Jude P. Dougherty
Jude P. Dougherty is the dean of the Department of Philosophy
at the Catholic University of America. |
The term "Bill of Rights" is commonly given to the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Like other declarations of rights before it, it is a document that both describes the fundamental liberties of a people and forbids the government to violate them. The first eight amendments to the Constitution list rights and freedoms possessed by every citizen. Amendments IX and X forbid Congress to adopt laws that would violate these rights.
The first Amendment reads, in part, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." The first of the religion clauses has come to be known as "the establishment clause"; the second as "the free-exercise clause." The meaning of these clauses, then and now, is the subject of this enquiry. I propose therefore to organize my material under four headings: (1) The role of religion in society, as understood by the framers of the Constitution; (2) the meaning of the religion clauses, as given in the Bill of Rights; (3) the relationship between church and state, as determined by the Supreme Court over the last forty years (that is, since the landmark 1947 Everson case); and (4) the implications of what I take to be a loss of respect for the intellectual and cultural role of religion in our society.
We can hardly imagine a United States without the freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment. Yet we are vaguely aware that when our nation came into being, established religions existed not only in Europe, but within the colonies themselves. The colonials were, for the most part, an English-speaking people who emigrated from a land where the Anglican Church was the established religion. That church retained its ascendancy in the New World. At the outbreak of the American Revolution in 1775, there were established churches in nine of the thirteen colonies. The Anglican Church had been established in Virginia in 1609; in New York starting in 1693. Establishment occurred in Maryland in 1702; in South Carolina, in 1706; in North Carolina, in 1711; and in Georgia, in 1758. The Congregational Church was established in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire. True, there were dissenters: Methodists and Presbyterians were not of one doctrinal mind with their Anglican brethren and repudiated certain features of the Anglican Episcopal structure. There were also various forms of Pietism, which were influential in some colonies.
The framers of the Constitution, taking into consideration dissent within the Church of England itself and cognizant of religious conflict on the Continent, decreed that there would be no established church for the
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