Religion And The Constitution Volume 1

Religion has become a charged token in a politics of division. In disputes about faith-based social services, public money for religious schools, the Pledge of Allegiance, Ten Commandments monuments, the theory of evolution, and many other topics, angry contestation threatens to displace America's historic commitment to religious freedom. Part of the problem, the authors argue, is that constitutional analysis of religious freedom has been hobbled by the idea of "a wall of separation" between church and state. That metaphor has been understood to demand that religion be treated far better than other concerns in some contexts, and far worse in others. Sometimes it seems to insist on both contrary forms of treatment simultaneously. Missing has been concern for the fair and equal treatment of religion. In response, the authors offer an understanding of religious freedom called Equal Liberty. Equal Liberty is guided by two principles. First, no one within the reach of the Constitution ought to be devalued on account of the spiritual foundation of their commitments. Second, all persons should enjoy broad rights of free speech, personal autonomy, associative freedom, and private property. Together, these principles are generous and fair to a wide range of religious beliefs and practices. With Equal Liberty as their guide, the authors offer practical, moderate, and appealing terms for the settlement of many hot-button issues that have plunged religious freedom into controversy. Their book calls Americans back to the project of finding fair terms of cooperation for a religiously diverse people, and it offers a valuable set of tools for working toward that end.

Balancing respect for religious conviction and the values of liberal democracy is a daunting challenge for judges and lawmakers, particularly when religious groups seek exemption from laws that govern others. Should members of religious sects be able to use peyote in worship? Should pacifists be forced to take part in military service when there is a draft, and should this depend on whether they are religious? How can the law address the refusal of parents to provide medical care to their children--or the refusal of doctors to perform abortions? Religion and the Constitution presents a new framework for addressing these and other controversial questions that involve competing demands of fairness, liberty, and constitutional validity. In the first of two major volumes on the intersection of constitutional and religious issues in the United States, Kent Greenawalt focuses on one of the Constitution's main clauses concerning religion: the Free Exercise Clause. Beginning with a brief account of the clause's origin and a short history of the Supreme Court's leading decisions about freedom of religion, he devotes a chapter to each of the main controversies encountered by judges and lawmakers. Sensitive to each case's context in judging whether special treatment of religious claims is justified, Greenawalt argues that the state's treatment of religion cannot be reduced to a single formula. Calling throughout for religion to be taken more seriously as a force for meaning in people's lives, Religion and the Constitution aims to accommodate the maximum expression of religious conviction that is consistent with a commitment to fairness and the public welfare.

Calling throughout for religion to be taken more seriously as a force for meaning in peoplee lives, Religion and the Constitution aims to accommodate the maximum expression of religious conviction that is consistent with a commitment to fairness and the public welfare. Includes information on abortion, atheism, atheists, Bear v. Reformed Mennonite Church, Harry Blackmun, William Brennan, Catholicism, Catholics, child custody, Christianity, Christians, conscientious objection to military service, discrimination, Employment Division v. Smith, Establishment Clause, religious exemptions, Fourteenth Amendment, Free Exercise Clause, Free Speech Clause, harassment by employers, Hinduism, Hindus, Islam, Muslims, Jehovahh Witnesses, Judaism, Jews, Lyng v. Northwestern Indian Cemetery Protective Association, Native American Church, Sandra Day OOonnor, Protestantism, Protestants, religion, religious beliefs, Sherbert v. Verner, Sunday closing laws, Wisconsin v. Yoder, zoning, Zummo v. Zummo, etc.

This book explains the original meaning of the two religion clauses of the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law [1] respecting an establishment of religion or [2] prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” As the book shows, both clauses were intended to protect the free exercise of religion or religious freedom. West shows the position taken by early Americans on four issues: (1) the general meaning of the “free exercise of religion,” including whether it is different from the meaning of “no establishment of religion”; (2) whether the free exercise of religion may be intentionally and directly limited, and if so, under what circumstances; (3) whether laws regulating temporal matters that also have a religious sanction violate the free exercise of religion; and (4) whether the free exercise of religion gives persons a right to be exempt from obeying valid civil laws that unintentionally and indirectly make it difficult or impossible to practice their religion in some way. A definitive work on the subject and a major contribution to the field of constitutional law and history, this volume is key to a better understanding of the ongoing constitutional adjudication based on the religion clauses of the First Amendment.

"Argues that the fundamental reason for church-state conflict is our aversion to questions of religious truth. By trying to avoid the question of religious truth, law and religion has ultimately reached a state of incoherence. He asserts that the answer to this dilemma is to take the agnostic turn: to take an empathetic and imaginative approach to questions of religious truth, one that actually confronts rather than avoids these questions, but without reaching a final judgment about what that truth is"--Jacket.

Publisher Description

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.

From the Publisher: In recent years a series of highly publicized controversies has focused attention on what are arguably the sixteen most important words in the U.S. Constitution: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." The ongoing court battles over the inclusion of the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, the now annual cultural quarrel over "Merry Christmas" vs. "Happy Holidays," and the political promotion of "faith-based initiatives" to address social problems-all reflect competing views of the meaning of the religious liberty clauses of the First Amendment. Such disputes, as Bruce T. Murray shows, are nothing new. For more than two hundred years Americans have disagreed about the proper role of religion in public life and where to draw the line between church and state. In this book, he reexamines these debates and distills the volumes of commentary and case law they have generated. He analyzes not only the changing contours of religious freedom but also the phenomenon of American civil religion, grounded in the notion that the nation's purpose is sanctified by a higher authority-an idea that can be traced back to the earliest New England colonists and remains deeply ingrained in the American psyche. Throughout the book, Murray connects past and present, tracing the historical roots of contemporary controversies. He considers why it is that a country founded on the separation of church and state remains singularly religious among nations, and concludes by showing how the Supreme Court's thinking about the religious liberty clauses has evolved since the late eighteenth century.

In Two Volumes. Volume 1, Christian History Of The Constitution Of The United States Of America; Volume 2, Christian Self-Government With Union.