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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
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