Degrading religion

[Andrew Koppelman]

>The Supreme Court has sometimes held that the reason for enforcing 
>the establishment clause is to protect religion from degradation by 
>contact with the state.  Justice Black's formulation in Engel v. 
>Vitale is typical:

When the power, prestige and financial support of government is 
placed behind a particular religious belief, the indirect coercive 
pressure upon religious minorities to conform to the prevailing 
officially approved religion is plain. But the purposes underlying 
the Establishment Clause go much further than that. Its first and 
most immediate purpose rested on the belief that a union of 
government and religion tends to destroy government and to degrade 
religion. The history of governmentally established religion, both in 
England and in this country, showed that whenever government had 
allied itself with one particular form of religion, the inevitable 
result had been that it had incurred the hatred, disrespect and even 
contempt of those who held contrary beliefs. That same history showed 
that many people had lost their respect for any religion that had 
relied upon the support for government to spread its faith. The 
Establishment Clause thus stands as an expression of principle on the 
part of the Founders of our Constitution that religion is too 
personal, too sacred, too holy, to permit its 'unhallowed perversion' 
by a civil magistrate.

Engel v. Vitale, 370 U.S. 421, 431-32 (1962).

Has anyone written a history of this idea?  I'm quite sure that 
"degradation" means something different to Roger Williams than it 
does to James Madison, and that Hugo Black has a different conception 
still, if only because the three men had such different ideas about 
what religion is affirmatively supposed to be.  I haven't found any 
source that engages this question.  If anyone knows of such a source 
(absolutely including if you've written such a work yourself), I'd be 
very grateful for a reference.




________________________________________

Andrew Koppelman
John Paul Stevens Professor of Law
and Professor of Political Science
Northwestern University School of Law
357 East Chicago Avenue
Chicago, IL  60611-3069

(312) 503-8431
mailto:akoppelman at northwestern.edu
________________________________________ 
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