A Historical Look at Separation of Church and State

A century or so before the Bill of Rights, separation of church and state was still an alien idea in colonial America. During the mid-17th century, for example, a Baptist who dared to preach his faith in Boston was sentenced to 30 lashes, and four Quakers were hung on Boston Common, all because their faith offended the Puritan-dominated government. Jewish immigrants were summarily deported by the governor of New York, then still known as New Amsterdam. And the laws of Maryland once criminalized the preaching and practice of “the Popish religion.”

The earliest colonizers of the New World, as we are reminded in Edwin S. Gaustad’s “Church and State in America,” were perfectly willing to use the state to enforce a religious conformity even stricter than what they had left behind in Europe. The Puritans, for example, earned their name because they sought to “purify the Church of England of lingering elements of Roman Catholicism,” Gaustad explains, and they persecuted both the Quakers and the suspected witches of Salem with the same bloodthirsty zeal.

Against these early traditions of religious intolerance, however, a startling new idea seized the imagination of the revolutionaries who invented the United States of America and framed its Constitution: “In the eyes of many colonists, political liberty was meaningless unless it guaranteed that most precious of all liberties--the freedom of the soul,” writes Gaustad. “[A] full and free religious liberty in a new and independent nation . . . was and is the essence of the American experiment.”

Yet, more than two centuries after the adoption of the 1st Amendment and its guarantee of religious freedom, the outcome of the experiment is still an open question--and that is the point of Gaustad’s brief but provocative and illuminating book. Thanks to the activism of religionists and secularists who are willing to go to court in support of their ideals, America is still at work on building what Jefferson called the “wall of separation” between church and state, still struggling to define the outer limits of the “free exercise” of religion under the 1st Amendment.

Gaustad, a professor emeritus of history at UC Riverside, deftly surveys the history of religious freedom in America in 150 richly illustrated pages. His real focus, however, is 20th century constitutional law: It is the Supreme Court where the lines between church and state are drawn, and Gaustad’s book is essentially a short survey of constitutional law as it relates to religious liberty.

Starting at the outset of our own litigious century, and continuing through the eve of the new millennium, “a trickle of church-state cases was transformed into a mighty river,” as Gaustad puts it. The Supreme Court fundamentally redefined the outer limits of religious freedom. No longer could a man be denied a commission as a notary public because he declined to take an oath to the Almighty, for example, nor could a conscientious objector who affirmed “devotion to goodness and virtue for their own sakes” be forced to serve in the military even though he denied a belief in “a Supreme Being.” Like every other social conflict in American society in the 20th century, the confrontation between atheists and believers was ultimately decided in the courts.

But the long line of freedom of religion cases, so effectively summarized by Gaustad in “Church and State,” has not silenced the debate over what is permissible under the 1st Amendment and what is not. Prayer in schools, the teaching of evolution, public sponsorship of Christmas displays and the use of peyote for sacramental purposes by Native Americans are still hot-button issues that provoke passions quite as fierce as any ever displayed by the Puritans toward the witches of Salem. Indeed, as Gaustad seems to suggest without explicitly saying so, nothing is more characteristic of American democracy than the willingness of dissenters, both religious and secular, to make the most intimate matters of conscience a subject of public discourse.

Jonathan Kirsch, a contributing writer to the Los Angeles Times Book Review, is the author, most recently, of “Moses: A Life” (Ballantine).