Race Relations :: essays research papers

1Race Relations and Modern Church-State RelationsThomas C. Berg*This article concerns religion and race two polemicsubjects that have figured prominently in Americas constitutionaland political debates since World War II. In particular, I wish totrace rough connections in the last 50 years between developmentsin church-state relations and developments in race relations.Recently scholars of the First Amendments Religion Clauses haveshown gratify in how the Supreme Courts modern decisions onthat subject might have been influenced by the political, social, andcultural context of recent decades such factors as the changingattitudes toward Roman universality,1 the rise of secularism inculture,2 the position of religious minorities,3 and so forth. Likesome of that other work, this Article traces the course of churchstaterelations not but in the Court itself, but in the broadersociety.It would hardly be surprising if developments concerningchurch and state in the last 50 years interac ted with developmentsin the bailiwick of race, since the latter have been so central to* Professor of Law, University of St. Thomas School of Law (Minneapolis). Ipresented portions of the material here at the Boston College Law reexamineSymposium on Separation of Church and State, in April 2002 at a FederalistSociety program on Faith Under Democracy, in March 2002 at a summer2001 symposium on Spirituality and Social Justice, sponsored by a grant fromthe Lilly Endowment and to a fall 2001 meeting of the Colloquium on Religionand Philosophy at Samford University. I thank David Bains, Hugh Floyd,Penny Marler, OTHERS, and the participants in those sessions for theircomments on the various versions of the paper.1See, e.g., John C. Jeffries, Jr., and James A. Ryan, A Political Hi grade of theEstablishment Clause, 100 Mich. L. Rev. 279 (2001) Thomas C. Berg, Anti-Catholicism and Modern Church-State Relations, 33 Loyola U-Chi. L. Rev. 121(2001) Douglas Laycock, The Underlying Unity of Sep aration and Neutrality,46 Emory L. J. 43, __-__ (1997).2See George W. Dent, Jr., Secularism and the Supreme Court, 1999 B.Y.U. L.Rev. 1.3See Stephen M. Feldman, Religion-Clause Revisionism Minorities and theDevelopment of Religious Freedom (unpublished draft, on file with author).2constitutional fairness and moral-political debate from theconstitutional success of Brown v. Board of Education4 to themoral-political triumph of the civil rights movement to the currentconflicts over how to define and achieve racial justice.The central story in church-state relations in the last 50years has been the rise of a fairly strict separation of church andstate as the paramount constitutional and moral ideal in the 1960sand 1970s, and the partial decline of that ideal from the 1980s