Steven K. Green has been busy over the last decade. His latest book, The Third Disestablishment, is essentially the third chapter in a thousand-page trilogy on American church-state history. It builds upon Green's 2010 The Second Disestablishment: Church and State in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford University Press, 2010) and his Inventing a Christian Nation: The Myth of the Religious Founding (Oxford University Press, 2015). The completion of this latest volume places Green's achievements on par with other defining works of church-state history, notably Anson Phelps Stokes's three-volume Church and State in the United States (Harper and Brothers, 1950) and Leo Pfeffer's massive Church, State, and Freedom (Beacon, 1953, 1967).
The Third Disestablishment is both well-substantiated and well-argued. In addition to conventional church-state sources, such as court opinions and legislative debates, it draws on Green's extensive reading of two leading Protestant outlets: (1) the Christian Century, the nation's most important Protestant magazine, and (2) archival materials related to Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State, an influential advocacy group. Green challenges two common explanations for the rise and fall of separationism in twentieth-century church-state jurisprudence. The first is that postwar Protestants embraced the doctrine of church-state separation because they were anti-Catholic. Green instead maintains that Supreme Court rulings drew on a wide range of salient beliefs and sensibilities, many of them secular, others pluralistic, but few of them overtly hostile to Roman Catholics or Catholicism. The second claim Green takes on is that the Reagan Revolution killed separationism. In fact, Green argues, the doctrine succumbed to its internal contradictions and the impact of Great Society priorities and programs.
Green's story begins in the 1920s. At a time when American Protestants were divided—and acutely aware of their divisions—American Catholics seemed both unsettlingly unified and determined to throw their weight around. Newly aroused suspicions about Catholic power helped undermine Al Smith's 1928 presidential campaign and lingered into the postwar era. Fears of communist subversion drained some of the vigor from anti-Catholicism. Still, a strong enough undercurrent remained to jeopardize the 1960 presidential campaign of a Catholic Congressman from Massachusetts. But John F. Kennedy avoided Smith's fate because mainline Protestants now rejected outright religious bigotry and because Kennedy affirmed separationism, as well as famously declaring that he wanted “no votes solely on account” of his faith.
Supreme Court jurisprudence was informed by these shifts in Protestant-Catholic relationships, Green argues, but not determined by them. Moreover, he reminds us that the court's activism in church-state matters actually began not in response to heavyweight denominational maneuvering, but with the dissident acts of a small Christian minority. The Jehovah's Witnesses began pushing the constitutional envelope in the 1930s through provocative proselytizing (Time Magazine called them “the most irritating sect in the United States”) and a refusal to salute the American flag while reciting the Pledge of Allegiance (63). Even though they lost many of the cases they brought, the Jehovah's Witnesses left an indelible stamp of First Amendment jurisprudence. They prompted the Supreme Court to take cognizance of free exercise cases involving local and state authority and expand its protections for religious expression.
The court's intervention in the Jehovah's Witnesses cases laid the groundwork for its approach to Establishment Clause cases in the late 1940s. The first of these, Everson v. Board of Education (1947), concerned reimbursement for the costs associated with children attending parochial schools. The next two—McCollum v. Board of Education (1948) and Zorach v. Clauson (1952)—concerned release time for student religious instruction. In Everson, the court reintroduced Thomas Jefferson's compelling metaphor, suggesting that the First Amendment erected “a wall of separation between church and state.” At times the court seemed tangled in paradoxes, insisting that the First Amendment erected an impassable barrier between church and state while permitting certain forms of government aid to religion. The wall metaphor helped popularize separationism but also contributed to its unraveling two decades hence.
The 1960s were a pivotal decade for church-state jurisprudence. The Supreme Court upheld Sunday laws primarily on general welfare grounds. However, it came down against school-sponsored devotional activities. In Engel v. Vitale (1962), the justices ruled that a prayer the New York State Board of Regents contrived for schoolchildren was unconstitutional because it was both a) compulsory and b) religious. The next year, the court ruled in School District of Abington Township v. Schempp that Pennsylvania's school-sponsored prayers and Bible readings also violated the Establishment Clause. These prayer decisions inspired widespread opposition, including a movement in Congress to amend the Constitution. That effort failed. However, the school prayer rulings remained a source of conservative grievance for decades to come.
Between 1968 and 1975, church-state thinking on the Supreme Court shifted again. Ecumenical currents within American evangelicalism, the Vatican's embrace of religious liberty, and the ascendance of civil rights politics turned “the two-decade conflict between Protestants and Catholics for cultural supremacy” into “a side-show” (13). State neutrality toward religion and interfaith cooperation began to displace separationism as guiding principles. The defining church-state case of this era, Lemon v. Kurtzman, created a test that required state laws to demonstrate a secular purpose, neither promote religion nor restrain it, and avoid “excessive entanglement of government and religion.” That last stipulation illustrated the inherent tensions within church-state jurisprudence. After all, it would take state oversight of the boundary between religion and secular activities to ensure that no entanglement existed.
The sum of The Third Establishment's cogent, multifaceted argument is that separationism was neither a precisely defined concept nor directed exclusively at Catholics. It embodied a diffuse, secularizing current in American culture which, when paired with the pluralistic impulses of the Civil Rights era, collapsed under the weight of its contradictions. Nonetheless, it defined American jurisprudence for decades. And no one has done a better job of illuminating its twentieth-century history than Steven Green.
