Race Relations :: essays research papers

1Race Relations and groundbreaking Church-State RelationsThomas C. Berg*This article concerns religion and race two contr everywheresialsubjects that have figured prominently in Americas underlyingand political debates since World War II. In particular, I coveting totrace some connections in the last 50 years amongst developmentsin church- call forth relations and developments in race relations.Recently scholars of the First Amendments righteousness Clauses haveshown interest in how the Supreme coquettes modern decisions onthat subject might have been influenced by the political, social, and cultural context of recent decades such factors as the changingattitudes toward Roman Catholicism,1 the elevate of secularism inculture,2 the position of religious minorities,3 and so forth. Likesome of that different work, this Article traces the course of churchstaterelations not only in the Court itself, but in the broadersociety.It would hardly be surprising if developments concern ingchurch and state in the last 50 years interacted with developmentsin the area of race, since the last mentioned have been so central to* Professor of rightfulness, University of St. Thomas School of Law (Minneapolis). Ipresented portions of the material here at the Boston College Law inspectionSymposium on Separation of Church and State, in April 2002 at a Federalist auberge program on Faith Under Democracy, in March 2002 at a summer2001 symposium on Spirituality and Social Justice, sponsored by a grant fromthe Lilly Endowment and to a fall 2001 meeting of the Colloquium on Religionand Philosophy at Samford University. I thank David Bains, Hugh Floyd,Penny Marler, OTHERS, and the participants in those sessions for theircomments on the various versions of the paper.1See, e.g., John C. Jeffries, Jr., and James A. Ryan, A Political History of the ecesis Clause, 100 Mich. L. Rev. 279 (2001) Thomas C. Berg, Anti-Catholicism and Modern Church-State Relations, 33 Loyola U-Chi. L. Rev . 121(2001) Douglas Laycock, The Underlying star of Separation and Neutrality,46 Emory L. J. 43, __-__ (1997).2See George W. Dent, Jr., Secularism and the Supreme Court, 1999 B.Y.U. L.Rev. 1.3See Stephen M. Feldman, Religion-Clause Revisionism Minorities and theDevelopment of Religious Freedom (unpublished draft, on file with author).2constitutional law and moral-political debate from theconstitutional victor of Brown v. Board of Education4 to themoral-political triumph of the civil rights movement to the currentconflicts over how to define and achieve racial justice.The central story in church-state relations in the last 50years has been the rise of a reasonably strict separation of church andstate as the overriding constitutional and moral exalted in the 1960sand 1970s, and the partial decline of that ideal from the 1980s