Mark Silk is Professor of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and director of the college’s Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life. He is a Contributing Editor of the Religion News Service. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily represent those of BCNN1.
In October of 1802, a group of Baptists in Danbury, Connecticut, wrote to President Thomas Jefferson asking that he support their efforts to do away with their state’s Standing Order, which taxed citizens to support the Congregational Church. Jefferson was happy to oblige, writing on January 1, 1803:
Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.
Over the past few decades, Jefferson’s wall metaphor has come in for plenty of criticism from conservatives — perhaps because, after the Supreme Court decided in the middle of the last century that the First Amendment’s religion clauses applied to the states, something like a wall of separation was indeed built between church and state.
From bans on prayer and Bible reading in public schools to teaching creationism to rules regarding religious displays on public land, the Court embraced the principle that government endorsement of religion, or the appearance of such endorsement, is unconstitutional. Call it the Endorsement Wall.
Today we’re seeing the building of a new wall of separation, this one resulting from a systematic effort to exempt religious institutions and individuals from government rules. Call it the Religious Liberty Wall.
During the last decades of the last century, the Supreme Court under Chief Justices Warren Burger and William Rehnquist took an increasingly expansive view of the government’s right to set bounds on religious liberty.
In the 1982 Bob Jones University case, the Court upheld the right of the IRS to deny tax-exempt status to private schools that practice racial discrimination. In 1986, it denied a Jewish chaplain’s right to wear a yarmulke while on duty and in uniform as a commissioned officer in the Air Force. And in the notorious 1990 peyote case, Employment Division v. Smith, the Court went so far as to assert that Free Exercise claims cannot be made in federal court, challenging neutral laws of general applicability.
Source: Religion News Service
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