School vouchers. The Pledge of Allegiance. The ban on government
grants for theology students. The abundance of church and state
issues brought before the Supreme Court in recent years underscores
an incontrovertible truth in the American legal system: the
relationship between the state and religion in this country is
still fluid and changing.
This, the first of two volumes by historian and legal scholar
James Hitchcock, provides the first comprehensive exploration of
the Supreme Court's approach to religion, offering a close look at
every case, including some that scholars have ignored.
Hitchcock traces the history of the way the Court has rendered
important decisions involving religious liberty. Prior to World War
II it issued relatively few decisions interpreting the Religious
Clauses of the Constitution. Nonetheless, it addressed some very
important ideas, including the 1819 Dartmouth College case, which
protected private religious education from state control, and the
Mormon polygamy cases, which established the principle that
religious liberty was restricted by the perceived good of
society.
It was not until the 1940s that a revolutionary change occurred
in the way the Supreme Court viewed religion. During that era, the
Court steadily expanded the scope of religious liberty to include
many things that were probably not intended by the framers of the
Constitution, and it narrowed the permissible scope of religion in
public life, barring most kinds of public aid to religious schools
and forbidding almost all forms of religious expression in the
public schools. This book, along with its companion volume, From
"Higher Law" to "Sectarian Scruples," offers a fresh analysis of
the Court's most important decisions in constitutional doctrine.
Sweeping in range, it paints a detailed picture of the changing
relationship between religion and the state in American
history.
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