Degrading religion

[Corcos, Christine]

I haven't yet read the new book by Garry Wills, Head and Heart: American
Christianities, but I think he takes this as his theme. 

 

Christine Corcos

LSU Law Center

 

________________________________

From: religionlaw-bounces at lists.ucla.edu
[mailto:religionlaw-bounces at lists.ucla.edu] On Behalf Of Douglas Laycock
Sent: Monday, October 08, 2007 10:28 AM
To: religionlaw at lists.ucla.edu
Subject: Re: Degrading religion

 

It's a frequent theme in the work of many separationists, but I don't
know of a piece devoted to it.  I have made the argument on occasion,
and believe it to be true, but I haven't explore its history.

Quoting Andrew Koppelman <akoppelman at law.northwestern.edu>:

>
>> 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
> ________________________________________


Douglas Laycock
Yale Kamisar Collegiate Professor of Law
University of Michigan Law School
625 S. State St.
Ann Arbor, MI  48109-1215
  734-647-9713

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