The Intent of the Founders

I attended my first CLE conference yesterday. I got no credit. However, I rather enjoyed the session. Professor Erwin Chemerinsky came out to our school to discuss the religion clauses of the First Amendment, along with our own Professor Kathleen Bergin.

I think the course was named improperly, as there was little discussion as to what the Founders meant with regard to religion. Thomas Jefferson's statement was brought up, as was a comment from Roger Williams (from the Constitution era), who once noted that the concept of separation of church and state helps protect the autonomy of religion.

Professor Chemerinsky first commented that historians could very well note that the keystone issue of the late 20th/early 21st Century is the rise of fundamentalism worldwide - be it Christian, Islamic, or Jewish. He also noted that one thing fundamentalists have in common is the desire to use the government to push their agenda, and one of the barriers to that in the United States is the "wall of separation" that has served as our country's backbone for so long. He mentioned how in the 1940s and 50s, the big push was to keep religion and government separate.

Where to go from here...
Let's see - there are basically three approaches (theories) to what the founders meant with the religion clauses. I will cover the first approach on this post, and come back to the other two later.
1: Strict Separation - (this is the approach Professor Chemerinsky prefers) That the government should be as secular as possible to the greatest extent possible. Professor Chemerinsky notes that as an absolute, this is impossible without encroaching on the free exercise clause, with chaplains in the military and prisons, for example. The concept is that if the government stays out of affairs of religion, then religion does not have to fear the government controlling it. An example of where this could come in handy is with the concept of subsidies for religious schools. There is a push in some circles to require that if the government provides monies to secular private schools, then it should do so with religious private schools. If the government gets into the church schools, then it can use the money as leverage to coerce the church to educate according to the state's agenda, not the church's. If the government feels that a Baptist-based methodology is best, then that's what the church schools, be they Catholic, Methodist, Jewish, or whatever, would end up having to follow that curriculum. If the state wants to endorse the Lutheran ten commandments as opposed to the Jewish or Catholic ten commandments, then that's what's going to happen. Finally, the Professor notes that if the Government finds a way to start giving subsidies to church functions, then the U.S. taxpayer will end up having to spend his own money (through taxes) to finance a church whose philosophy he disagrees with. For an example of this, consider what would happen if a Satanic church started a school and asked for government funds - the government would use your money to finance a school that the fundamentalist Christians would likely most abhor - yet is entirely consistent with what the fundamentalist movement is pushing for. Tax dollars should not go to fund religion, the argument goes, and as such, the government should try to remain as neutral as possible.

Interesting sidenote - the ten commandment displays such as the one at the Capital Building in Austin were placed by Cecil B. DeMille to promote his movie The Ten Commandments. He placed these all over the country, at least 60 of them.