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Giving Up On the Founding: The Separation of Church and State and the Writing of Establishment Clause History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 February 2013

Christopher S. Grenda
Christopher S. Grenda*
Affiliation:
Bronx Community College of the City University of New York
*
Address correspondence and reprint requests to: Christopher S. Grenda, 702 Firethorn Drive, Union, NJ 07083-5074. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Examination of the First Amendment's establishment clause in the post World War II period is unique in American constitutional interpretation because virtually all voices had agreed on one point, originalism. Few if any significant writers on the establishment clause had doubted the centrality of the founders' original intent for interpreting the clause's meaning. Yet this now has changed. Unlike their predecessors, leading advocates of church-state separation have now moved away from an original meaning interpretation of the establishment clause. Yet these separationists continue to try to ground their normative policy prescriptions in establishment clause mandates. They attempt this balancing act by employing narrative strategies of evolutionary processes in history. They do not simply track changes in constitutional doctrine, but characterize changes yielding greater separation between church and state through the nation's history as incipient in the Republic's founding, an originally inchoate church-state principle only fully formed through historical evolution. In the process, they sweep myriad separationist ideas into their progressively evolving narratives which have never been enunciated as law. Their accounts thus often reflect less an attempt to track historical developments in fundamental law than an attempt to construct fundamental law narratives. These attempts highlight persistent historical problems in the separationist endeavor that require attention if the evolutionary narratives of leading separationist are to shape the field of establishment clause history.

Type
Articles
Information
Politics and Religion , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , June 2013 , pp. 402 - 434
Copyright
Copyright © Religion and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association 2013 

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