For the Muslim Times’ Encyclopedic collection on Separation of Mosque-Church and State, click the tab of secularism in the top menu please

Economist: “THE wall between state and church”, Justice Hugo Black wrote in Everson v Board of Education, a case from 1947, “must be kept high and impregnable”. Justice Black was quoting a line Thomas Jefferson used in 1802 to reassure a group of Baptists that, as president, he would protect the religious liberty of minority sects. The well-pedigreed wall metaphor (Jefferson had borrowed it from Roger Williams, a 17th-century Puritan theologian) is centuries old, but it is becoming less and less apt as a description of the unique relationship between America’s religions and its state institutions. What’s going on?

Government programmes are not completely barred from touching places of worship: it is not an “establishment of religion”, Everson held, for states to subsidise the cost of busing children to parochial schools as well as to public ones. In the nearly 70 intervening years, the Supreme Court has issued a gaggle of rulings on the meaning of the First Amendment’s “establishment clause”. Prayer in school has been ruled out, as have stand-alone nativity scenes inside government buildings. But crèches, crosses and Hanukkah menorahs in public squares have been deemed acceptable. Meanwhile, monuments to the Ten Commandments have been subjected to a Solomonic split decision: such displays are fine near a capitol building but forbidden outside a courthouse. Such microscopic distinctions often come in the form of split decisions. But in recent years, the wall of separation—never quite as sturdy as Justice Black described it—has taken on a few more cracks.

More: