Friday, July 01, 2005

Church, state and the courts in America But whose law should prevail?
Jun 30th 2005

From The Economist print edition

The church-state divide may once again be about to dominate American politics. Prepare for a summer of deep discussions by reading this useful new guide:
Divided by God: America's Church-State Problem—And What We Should Do About ItBy Noah FeldmanFarrer, Straus & Giroux; 306 pages; $25Buy it at
Amazon.comAmazon.co.uk

“CONGRESS shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” What could be simpler than the First Amendment? Quite a lot of things, it seems, judging by this week's Supreme Court decision. It is fine to display the Ten Commandments on government land, but displaying them inside a courthouse violates the separation of church and state.
Such seemingly arbitrary distinctions are typical of the tortured church-state divide in America. The legality of Christmas cribs on government property can be reduced, crudely, to the “plastic reindeer rule”. A reindeerless crib endorses Christianity; one with them (and preferably a Santa as well) is all right.

More than ever, America seems to be a country “divided by God”, to borrow the title of Noah Feldman's new book. Americans are split, not between believers and non-believers (virtually all of them are in the first camp), but between two groups who disagree about the role of religion in the public square: “legal secularists”, who want the law to make government Godless, and “values evangelicals”, who insist that religion is relevant to political life.

More here:
http://www.economist.com/books/displayStory.cfm?story_id=4127042

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