Race Relations :: essays research papers

1 Race Relations and Modern Church-State Relations Thomas C. Berg* This article concerns religion and race – two controversial subjects that have figured prominently in America’s constitutional and political debates since World War II. In particular, I wish to trace some connections in the last 50 years between developments in church-state relations and developments in race relations. Recently scholars of the First Amendment’s Religion Clauses have shown interest in how the Supreme Court’s modern decisions on that subject might have been influenced by the political, social, and cultural context of recent decades: such factors as the changing attitudes toward Roman Catholicism,1 the rise of secularism in culture,2 the position of religious minorities,3 and so forth. Like some of that other work, this Article traces the course of churchstate relations not only in the Court itself, but in the broader society. It would hardly be surprising if developments concerning church and state in the last 50 years interacted with developments in the area of race, since the latter have been so central to * Professor of Law, University of St. Thomas School of Law (Minneapolis). I presented portions of the material here at the Boston College Law Review Symposium on Separation of Church and State, in April 2002; at a Federalist Society program on â€Å"Faith Under Democracy,† in March 2002; at a summer 2001 symposium on Spirituality and Social Justice, sponsored by a grant from the Lilly Endowment; and to a fall 2001 meeting of the Colloquium on Religion and Philosophy at Samford University. I thank David Bains, Hugh Floyd, Penny Marler, [OTHERS], and the participants in those sessions for their comments on the various versions of the paper. 1See, e.g., John C. Jeffries, Jr., and James A. Ryan, A Political History of the Establishment 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 Separation 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L. Rev. 1. 3See Stephen M. Feldman, Religion-Clause Revisionism: Minorities and the Development of Religious Freedom (unpublished draft, on file with author). 2 constitutional law and moral-political debate – from the constitutional success of Brown v. Board of Education4 to the moral-political triumph of the civil rights movement to the current conflicts over how to define and achieve racial justice. The central story in church-state relations in the last 50 years has been the rise of a fairly strict separation of church and state as the overriding constitutional and moral ideal in the 1960s and 1970s, and the partial decline of that ideal from the 1980s