Conflicts Between Church, State on Rise : Constitution: Doctrine of separation is threatened by Religious Right and by people who support the concept but don’t understand its implementation, survey asserts.

Church-state conflicts at the state and local levels continued to grow in the last year, with a new report showing 247 such incidents.

The report, by Americans United for Separation of Church and State, was released Monday at the group’s national conference in San Francisco. Copies of the report were made available in Washington.

The fifth annual report covers September, 1992, to August, 1993. Its findings were based on reports from members, media accounts and cases in which the organization was involved. The group catalogued 196 incidents during the 1991-92 period.

According to the report, Michigan topped the survey with 14 incidents, followed by California with 13, Texas with 12, New Jersey 11 and Virginia 10. New York, Indiana and Wisconsin had 9, and Colorado, Tennessee and South Carolina reported 8 each.

“Separation of church and state faces at least two serious challenges that could undermine its ultimate survival,” the report said in introducing its catalogue of incidents.

The report said the first threat is “a systematic war of criticism” being waged by Religious Right activists against the separation concept. It cited, for example, campaigns to return state-sponsored prayer to the public schools and to implement voucher plans allowing state aid to private, sectarian schools.

Equally threatening, the report said, is the attitude of many Americans who, according to polls, overwhelmingly endorse separation as a concept but “seem to have difficulty understanding the need for it in practice.”

“Uncomfortably large numbers of Americans say they favor ideas such as a school prayer amendment to the Constitution, tax aid to religion on a non-preferential basis or the display of religious symbols by the government,” the report said.

Americans United divides the incidents into four categories: religion in the public schools, free exercise disputes, public funding of religious organizations and state endorsement of religion.

Many of the disputes in this year’s report stemmed from the conflict over the permissible bounds of religion in the public schools, in which there were 111 incidents reported from 38 states.

The report noted that Pat Robertson’s American Center for Law and Justice, relying on a Texas court ruling at odds with recent Supreme Court decisions, had sent mailings to public school officials demanding that “student-initiated” prayer be allowed during graduation ceremonies.

According to the report, Michigan, Indiana and Virginia had especially severe conflicts over the issue.

In the other categories, Americans United reported 46 incidents in 31 states involving free-exercise disputes; 47 incidents in 28 states involving public funding of religious organizations, and 43 incidents in 30 states involving state endorsement of religion.

The incidents range from attempts to advance religion by funding sectarian schools through vouchers or tuition tax credits to efforts by the government to restrict religion and religiously motivated practices through zoning, historic preservation laws and licensing.

The incidents in Michigan included a conflict in Grand Rapids over the display of a menorah in a public square, a court case involving parents who taught their children at home for religious reasons and a court order to a public school in Bloomingdale telling it to remove a painting of Jesus from the hallway.

Other incidents included a suit filed by an atheist in South Carolina over a state requirement that public officeholders believe in a supreme being, a state court ruling in North Dakota that a law requiring bars to close on Good Friday violated church-state separation and a threatened suit in Kentucky over actions by two judges who required divorcing couples to attend seminars led by a Roman Catholic group.