The Loss and Recovery of a Place for Faith in the Public Square
by Rick Plasterer, Juicy Ecumenism:
Paul McNulty, President of Grove City College, discussed the decades long era of challenge to religion in the public square at a Faith and Law forum on Capitol Hill on November 15.
The Rise of Separationism
The era began with the Supreme Court’s Everson v. Board of Education decision in 1947, which advanced a doctrine of “strict separation” of religion and the state. Arch Everson of Ewing township, New Jersey sued the Board of Education of Ewing claiming that a program of re-imbursing parents for the transportation of children to schools, including parochial schools, was unconstitutional. The court found instead that re-imbursing parents for transportation of their children to school was a general public interest, and therefore not unconstitutional. But the court said for the first time that the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment applied to states as well as the federal government, and that the Establishment Clause erected “a wall of separation” between church and state, which “must be kept high and impregnable.” Less commonly quoted, but no less exclusionary of religious faith and practice from the public world was the court’s declaration in the same paragraph that the government must not “aid” any particular religion or religion in general.
But, McNulty said, the American founders had no desire to “extract” religion from the public square. Their concern was protecting churches from the state, not the state from the church. He noted that the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, enacted by the Congress of the United States under the Articles of Confederation “provided for space for churches to be built.” In contrast, the Everson decision decreed a “strict separation” of church and state. Seriously applied, Everson would “seek to limit religious influence in the public square.” Together with other important developments in society at mid-twentieth century, the Everson decision resulted in significantly reducing “the place of the Christian faith in public life.”
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