Secularists vs. Providentialists Th By Richard M. Reinsch II • March 13, 2014

[Draggingtree]

Secularists vs. Providentialists Th

By Richard M. Reinsch II • March 13, 2014

Embarkation of the Pilgrims, Robert W. Weir / Wikimedia Commons

Our legal mandarins have constructed a self-congratulatory narrative about their vindication of the First Amendment’s religion clauses. Supposedly, until the day in 1947 when the Supreme Court announced in the Everson v. Board of Educationcase that a “high and impregnable … wall of separation” must be maintained between church and state, religious entanglement prevailed throughout the land.Everson’s principle that government was to provide no aid to religion was subsequently re-grounded in the early 1960s prayer cases, Engel v. Vitale andAbington School District v. Schempp, which proclaimed that legislation must be neutral toward matters of religion and secular in its purpose. Other victories for “secular neutrality” followed. We now call this the standard version of American religious freedom. Some, apparently, don’t find it convincing.

 

They include the renowned constitutional scholar Steven Smith, whose historical and textual account in this book undermines the standard narrative. He begins by observing that religious freedom in America is a recovery of Christian theology’s long-held commitments to freedom of the church and freedom of conscience. America did not so much offer a new “gift to the world” as assemble the institutional architecture that would protect key historical notions of Christian religious freedom. So to understand the religion clauses of the First Amendment, one need not kiss the ring of Justice William Brennan.