Race Relations :: essays research papers

1Race dealings and Modern Church-State RelationsThomas C. Berg*This article concerns religion and race two polemicsubjects that realize figured prominently in Americas entireand political debates since World War II. In particular, I wish to track down some 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 interest in how the Supreme Courts neo decisions onthat subject might have been influenced by the political, social, andcultural mise en scene of recent decades such factors as the changingattitudes toward Roman Catholicism,1 the rise of secularism inculture,2 the position of religious minorities,3 and so forth. Likesome of that other work, this phrase traces the course of churchstaterelations not only in the Court itself, only if in the broadersociety.It would hardly be surprising if developments concerningchurch and state in the last 50 ye ars interacted with developmentsin the area 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 ReviewSymposium on insularity of Church and State, in April 2002 at a FederalistSociety schedule on Faith Under Democracy, in March 2002 at a summer2001 symposium on Spirituality and Social Justice, sponsored by a pass fromthe Lilly Endowment and to a fall 2001 meeting of the Colloquium on Religionand doctrine at Samford University. I thank David Bains, Hugh Floyd,Penny Marler, OTHERS, and the participants in those sessions for theircomments on the various(a) versions of the paper.1See, e.g., John C. Jeffries, Jr., and James A. Ryan, A Political History of theEstablishment Clause, cytosine 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 U nity 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L.Rev. 1.3See Stephen M. Feldman, Religion-Clause Revisionism Minorities and theDevelopment of Religious Freedom (unpublished draft, on buck with author).2constitutional law and lesson-political debate from theconstitutional success of brownness v. Board of Education4 to themoral-political triumph of the civil rights movement to the currentconflicts over how to check and achieve racial justice.The central story in church-state relations in the last 50years has been the rise of a fairly rigorous separation of church andstate as the overriding constitutional and moral ideal in the 1960sand 1970s, and the partial decline of that ideal from the mid-eighties