Church and State in America

Two distinct ideologies centered on the role of religion in the state have been identified in American history by Frank Lambert (2003): the "Planning Fathers" who initially settled the New World in the New England and Atlantic colonies sought to create a haven for their own religious beliefs, while the "Founding Fathers" who wrote first the Declaration of Independence and later the U.S. Constitution and its first set of Amendments sought to ensure religious freedom by "separating" Church from State and ensuring that neither entity could dictate to the other. Noting that the overwhelming majority of the early "planners" and "founders" were members of Protestant Christian sects, Robert Boston (1993) also pointed out that none of the "founders" were of the opinion that the new nation would benefit from an overly close integration of religion and politics.

In this essay, it will be argued that the separation of Church and State affirmed in the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment remains vital today û particularly in light of the fact that the United States is more and more readily identifiable as a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, and multi-religious society that should not be in any sense dominated by any religious group or belief system. Congress and the Court should act, at all times, to preserve religious independence and freedom of worship. This should include rejecting any and all attempts to create or to ide

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heightened constitutional scrutiny. In so holding, according to analysts, the Court dramatically limited its earlier decisions in Sherbert v. Verner and Wisconsin v. Yoder, both of which applied strict scrutiny to religious accommodation claims (Hamburger, 2002). Writing for the Court in Smith, Justice Scalia asserted that heightened scrutiny of religious accommodation claims would produce a system in which each conscience became a law unto itself or in which judges would be forced to weigh the social importance of all laws against the centrality of all religious beliefs. As one might argue, the question of constitutionally mandated religious accommodation has produced inconsistent results in a series of decisions between Sherbert and Smith (Hall, 1992). Various decisions reveal considerable tension within and between free exercise doctrine which commands the government to safeguard religious liberty and the Establishment Clause doctrine that constrains the government to avoid aggrandizing or co-opting religion. The Supreme Court has struggled to find a neutral course in this area (Harrison & Gilbert, 1998). The RFRA was a Congressional effort to reverse the Smith decision and was supported by a broad coalition, incl
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2081
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)