Overview

In 1947, the Supreme Court embraced the concept of church-state separation as shorthand for the meaning of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. The concept became embedded in Court's jurisprudence and remains so today. Yet separation of church and state is not just a legal construct; it is embedded in the culture. Church-state separation was a popular cultural ideal, chiefly for Protestants and secularists, long before the Supreme Court adopted it as a constitutional principle. While the Court's church-state decisions have impacted public attitudes--particularly those controversial holdings regarding prayer and Bible reading in public schools--the idea of church-state separation has remained relatively popular; recent studies indicate that approximately two-thirds of Americans support the concept, even though they disagree over how to apply it. In the follow up to his 2010 book The Second Disestablishment, Steven K. Green sets out to do examine the development of modern separationism from a legal and cultural perspective. The Third Disestablishment examines the dominant religious-cultural conflicts of the 1930s-1950s between Protestants and Catholics, but it also shows how other trends and controversies during mid-century impacted both judicial and popular attitudes toward church-state separation: the Jehovah's Witnesses' cases of the late-30s and early-40's, Cold War anti-communism, the religious revival and the rise of civil religion, the advent of ecumenism, and the presidential campaign of 1960. The book then examines how events of the 1960s-the school prayer decisions, the reforms of Vatican II, and the enactment of comprehensive federal education legislation providing assistance to religious schools-produced a rupture in the Protestant consensus over church-state separation, causing both evangelicals and religious progressives to rethink their commitment to that principle. Green concludes by examining a series of church-state cases in the late-60s and early-70s where the justices applied notions of church-state separation at the same time they were reevaluating that concept.

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9780190908140

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Reviews

Yet another sterling effort by one of America's leading historians of religious liberty. Having taken us from colonial times to World War I in three previous volumes, Steven Green now traces the rise and fall of church-state separation ideals in American law and culture in the twentieth century. He combines careful legal analysis of familiar First Amendment cases with a novel account of the escalating cultural wars over separatist ideals waged in religious, political, academic, advocacy, and media circles alike. Here is a compelling and authoritative story, well and wistfully told. --John Witte, Jr., Director of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion, Emory University Steven Green is the Charles Dickens of American religious disestablishmentthe preeminent chronicler of the characters, movements, ideas, and decisions that have shaped church-state relations in the US. This volume, the latest installment in his oeuvre, brings the tale into the 1950s, the era of high judicial disestablishment. It should be required reading for anyone who care about religious liberty and its history. --Noah R. Feldman, author of The Three Lives of James Madison: Genius, Partisan, President

Author Information

Steven K. Green is Fred H. Paulus Professor of Law and Affiliated Professor of History, and Director of the Center for Religion, Law, and Democracy at Willamette University. He is the author of Inventing a Christian America: The Myth of the Religious Founding, The Bible, the School, and the Constitution: The Clash That Shaped Modern Church-State Doctrine, and The Second Disestablishment: Church and State in Nineteenth-Century America and co-author of Religious Freedom and the Supreme Court.

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