Reexamining the religious roots of freedom.

• Author: Evans, M. Stanton

AS THE renewed debate over prayer in the public schools suggests, the cultural conflict of the modern era finds vivid and enduring focus in the legal dispute about the place of religion in society. Here, the battle is overt, relentless, and pervasive--with traditional belief and custom retreating before a secularist onslaught in the courts and other public institutions.

During the past three decades, the U.S. Supreme Court has handed down a series of rulings that decree a "wall of separation" between affairs of state and the precepts of religion. In 1962, the Court said an officially sponsored prayer recited in the New York public schools was an abridgement of Americans, freedoms. This prayer read, in its entirety: "Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence on Three, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers, and our country." In the Court's opinion, this supplication triggered the First Amendment ban against an "establishment of religion," logic that later was extended to reading the Bible and reciting the Lord's Prayer in the classroom.

In adopting the First Amendment, according to the Court, the Founding Fathers meant to sever all connection between religious faith and government, requiring that religion be a purely private matter. As Justice Hugo Black put it in an oft-quoted statement: "The `establishment of religion, clause of the First Amendment means at least this: Neither a state nor the federal government can set up a church. Neither can pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another.... No tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion."

This doctrine has been affirmed and amplified in many rulings since. In support of it, Black and his successors (most recently Justice David Souter) have offered a reading of U.S. history that supposedly shows the intentions of the people who devised the First Amendment. In a nutshell, this tells Americans that the Founders chiefly responsible for the Constitution's religion clauses were James Madison and Thomas Jefferson; that they held views intensely hostile toward any governmental backing for religion; and that the amendment was a triumph for their separationist position.

The First Amendment depicted by Justice Black and other liberal jurists is a fabrication--a prime example of picking and choosing elements from the past to suit the ideological fashions of the present. An examination of the history of the nation's founding reveals that the Court and its supporters have misstated the material facts about the issue in every possible fashion.

To begin with, state papers, legal arrangements, and political comment of the founding generation show that American culture in that period was suffused with religious doctrine. The point is made by the very concept of an "establishment of religion." This term had a definite meaning in England and the colonies that is critical to understanding the debate about the First Amendment. If signified an official church that occupied a privileged position with the state, was vested with certain powers denied to others, and was supported from the public treasury. Such was the Church of England in Great Britain, as well as numerous churches in the colonies at the beginning of the American Revolution.

In 1775, no fewer than nine colonies had such arrangements. Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire had systems of local church establishment in favor of the Congregationalists. In the South, from Maryland on down, the establishments were Episcopal. In New York, there was a system of locally supported Protestant clergy. Because of growing religious diversity within the states, pressure mounted to disestablish these official churches. In particular, increasingly numerous Baptists and Presbyterians made headway against the Anglican position that further was weakened by the identification of many Episcopal ministers with the English.

Even so, at the...