Church and State in the United States: Historical Development and Contemporary Problems of Religious Freedom Under the Constitution

1951 ◽  
Vol 56 (3) ◽  
pp. 602
Author(s):  
Alvin W. Johnson ◽  
Anson Phelps Stokes
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
Religious Freedom ◽  
Church And State ◽  
The United States

Secularism and US Religion Jurisprudence

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline Corbin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Religious Freedom ◽  
Church And State ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
Religious Liberty ◽  
Establishment Clause ◽  
Free Exercise ◽  
Free Exercise Clause ◽  
Constitutional Jurisprudence

Religious surveys are finding greater percentages of Americans who self-identify as secular. At the same time, religious exemptions under the Free Exercise Clause have become more difficult to obtain. However, religion jurisprudence in the United States has not become more secular for two reasons. First, this greater unwillingness to grant constitutional exemptions reflects a shift in constitutional jurisprudence from “separationism” to “neutrality.” Rather than building a wall between church and state, the Establishment Clause is now interpreted to impose fewer restraints on state-sponsored religion. Second, statutes like the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act and its state counterparts have not only reestablished separationist era levels of protection for religious liberty but increased them. The result is a religion jurisprudence where religion is accommodated more than ever, while the state has more leeway to advance religion. This combination has unfortunate consequences for both secular people and core secular values, such as antidiscrimination.

Dissent in the Atlantic World, 1787–1830

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Carté Engel
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
First Amendment ◽  
Church And State ◽  
State Level ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Population ◽  
Simple Fact ◽  
General Role

The very term ‘Dissenter’ became problematic in the United States, following the passing of the First Amendment. The formal separation of Church and state embodied in the First Amendment was followed by the ending of state-level tax support for churches. None of the states established after 1792 had formal religious establishments. Baptists, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Methodists accounted for the majority of the American population both at the beginning and end of this period, but this simple fact masks an important compositional shift. While the denominations of Old Dissent declined relatively, Methodism grew quickly, representing a third of the population by 1850. Dissenters thus faced several different challenges. Primary among these were how to understand the idea of ‘denomination’ and also the more general role of institutional religion in a post-establishment society. Concerns about missions, and the positions of women and African Americans are best understood within this context.

scholarly journals Immunizing the Flock: How the Pandemic Court Rewrote Religious Freedom

Laws ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 12
Author(s):  
Paul Baumgardner
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Religious Freedom ◽  
The United States ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
The Past ◽  
The U.S

When coronavirus began to descend upon the United States, religious freedom advocates across the country sounded the alarm that citizens’ religious practices and institutions were under threat. Although some of the most extreme arguments championed by these advocates were not validated by our legal system, many were. This article explores the underappreciated gains made by religious freedom advocates before the U.S. Supreme Court over the past year. As a result of the “Pandemic Court”, religious freedom in the United States has been rewritten. This promises to radically change the educational, employment, and health prospects of millions of Americans for the rest of the pandemic and long afterwards.

scholarly journals Book Review: Religion and Politics in America: An Encyclopedia of Church and State in American Life

2017 ◽  
Vol 56 (3) ◽  
pp. 219
Author(s):  
Amanda Sprochi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Religion And Politics ◽  
The United States ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
American Life ◽  
Politics And Religion ◽  
University History ◽  
History Of

Religion and Politics in America: An Encyclopedia of Church and State in American Life provides an overview of the relationship between politics and religion in the United States. Smith, president of Tyndale International University, history instructor at Georgia Gwinnett College, and Presbyterian minister, with his collaborators, has created a resource that spans the history of the United States from the colonial era to the present day. The 360 entries in the encyclopedia are arranged alphabetically by topic and are signed by the contributor, and each article includes references for further reading. Cross-references, a chronological time line, and a comprehensive index help to identify particular topics and to facilitate further reading.

scholarly journals From America to the World: Protestant Christianity's Creation of Religious Liberty

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 8
Author(s):  
Peter A. Lillback
Keyword(s):  
Religious Freedom ◽  
Church And State ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early Church ◽  
Economic Prosperity ◽  
Religious Persecution ◽  
Constitutional Protection ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The World ◽  
The Relationship

ABSTRACT: Half the population of the world to this day still has not experienced religious freedom. Religious persecution often still occurs at many places in the world. Research studies show that there is a direct correlation between religious freedom and economic prosperity. "Prosperity is the result of freedom, therefore the best way to improve the economic prosperity of a nation is to ensure freedom for its citizens." This article will first elaborate models of the relationship between church and state, and then explain the basic principle of the Bible regarding religious freedom. It further explains why incarceration of religious freedom or of conscience by the state is wrong, despite the reasons of protecting its citizens from false religion or from a cult. This paper will also explore religious persecution from the time of early church until the birth of Protestantism, and then speaks about the struggle and the protection of religious freedom. Furthermore this article goes into what underlies the constitutional protection of religious freedom in America, and then browse through the struggle and the protection of religious freedom as a struggle of the world. KEY WORDS: religious freedom, religious conflict, heresy, early church, Protestantism, religious freedom in the United States of America.

Remapping American Catholicism

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Matovina
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Latin America ◽  
North America ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Catholicism ◽  
Geographic Dispersion ◽  
Historical Perspectives ◽  
European Immigrants ◽  
Church And Society

This chapter argues that the long-standing links between Latin and North America already lead many Latinos to adopting a more hemispheric perspective to Catholicism in the United States. The memory that Hispanics established faith communities in Spanish and Mexican territories before the United States expanded into them shaped the historical development of those communities as they, their descendants, and even later immigrants became part of the United States. The chapter shows how such perceptions conflict with the presumption that European immigrants and their descendants set a unilateral paradigm for assimilating newcomers into church and society. Since the early 1990s, the geographic dispersion of Latinos across the United States and the growing diversity of their national backgrounds have brought the historical perspectives of Catholics from Latin America and the United States into unprecedented levels of daily contact.

Religion as Spirituality

2020 ◽  
pp. 94-126
Author(s):  
Michael D. McNally
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Native American ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Religious Freedom ◽  
The United States ◽  
Sacred Places ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
Sacred Lands ◽  
American Spirituality ◽  
Religious Claim

This chapter examines the failure in the courts of Native appeals to religious freedom protections for sacred lands, and it extends the previous chapter's analysis of the reception of Native claims to religion as religion. Where a religious claim conforms to the subjective, interior spirituality that has become naturalized in the United States, it has worked reasonably well in the courts. This is emphatically not the case where claims involve religious relationships with, uses of, and obligations to, land. The chapter explains how courts reason their way out of taking steps to protect Native American religious freedom when sacred places are threatened, a puzzling matter in that courts consistently acknowledge the sincerity of the religious beliefs and practices associated with those sacred places. Along the way the chapter develops a fuller sense of the workings of the discourse of Native American spirituality as it comes to control judicial comprehension of Native religious freedom claims.

United States: Exceptional Freedoms, Fabricated Fears

Hate Spin ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cherian George
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Free Speech ◽  
Religious Freedom ◽  
Hate Speech ◽  
The United States ◽  
Legal Framework ◽  
Constitutional Protections ◽  
High Degree

The United States has exceptionally strong Constitutional protections for free speech, but also for religious freedom. This chapter considers how this unique legal framework affects hate spin in the country. It finds that although hate speech can be expressed with a high degree of impunity, strong anti-discrimination laws limit the harms caused by such speech. Hate spin can, nonetheless, succeed in fostering fear and cultivating prejudice against minorities. The chapter examines how a network of anti-Muslim activists have used hate spin to campaign against mosque building, to oppose multi-cultural textbooks, and to introduce legislation protecting states from the fabricated threat of encroaching Muslim law. Beyond their stated goals, which may be frustrated by courts, these campaigns often have the symbolic purpose of spreading Islamophobia.

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