Download or read book Church State and Freedom written by Leo Pfeffer and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2018-05-02 with total page 849 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “I believe that complete separation of church and state is one of those miraculous things which can be best for religion and best for the state, and the best for those who are religious and those who are not religious.” – Leo Pfeffer Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. These sixteen words epitomize a radical experiment unique in human history . . . It is the purpose of this book to examine how this experiment came to be made, what are the implications and consequences of its application to democratic living in America today, and what are the forces seeking to frustrate and defeat that experiment. (From the Foreword)

Download or read book Separation of Church and State written by Philip HAMBURGER and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a powerful challenge to conventional wisdom, Philip Hamburger argues that the separation of church and state has no historical foundation in the First Amendment. The detailed evidence assembled here shows that eighteenth-century Americans almost never invoked this principle. Although Thomas Jefferson and others retrospectively claimed that the First Amendment separated church and state, separation became part of American constitutional law only much later. Hamburger shows that separation became a constitutional freedom largely through fear and prejudice. Jefferson supported separation out of hostility to the Federalist clergy of New England. Nativist Protestants (ranging from nineteenth-century Know Nothings to twentieth-century members of the K.K.K.) adopted the principle of separation to restrict the role of Catholics in public life. Gradually, these Protestants were joined by theologically liberal, anti-Christian secularists, who hoped that separation would limit Christianity and all other distinct religions. Eventually, a wide range of men and women called for separation. Almost all of these Americans feared ecclesiastical authority, particularly that of the Catholic Church, and, in response to their fears, they increasingly perceived religious liberty to require a separation of church from state. American religious liberty was thus redefined and even transformed. In the process, the First Amendment was often used as an instrument of intolerance and discrimination.

Download or read book The Separation of Church and State written by Forrest Church and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2011-05-03 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now in paperback, a primer of essential writings about one of the cornerstones of our democracy by the original authors of the Constitution, edited by preeminant liberal theologian Forrest Church. Americans will never stop debating the question of church-state separation, and such debates invariably lead back to the nation’s beginnings and the founders’ intent. The Separation of Church and State presents a basic collection of the founders’ teachings on this topic. This concise primer gets past the rhetoric that surrounds the current debate, placing the founders’ vivid writings on religious liberty in historical perspective. Edited and with running commentary by Forrest Church, this important collection informs anyone curious about the original blueprint for our country and its government.

Download or read book Freedom of Religion and the Secular State written by Russell Blackford and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2012-01-17 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring the relationship between religion and the state Focusing on the intersection of religion, law, and politics in contemporary liberal democracies, Blackford considers the concept of the secular state, revising and updating enlightenment views for the present day. Freedom of Religion and the Secular State offers a comprehensive analysis, with a global focus, of the subject of religious freedom from a legal as well as historical and philosophical viewpoint. It makes an original contribution to current debates about freedom of religion, and addresses a whole range of hot-button issues that involve the relationship between religion and the state, including the teaching of evolution in schools, what to do about the burqa, and so on.

Download or read book Religious Freedom written by John A. Ragosta and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2013-04-22 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For over one hundred years, Thomas Jefferson and his Statute for Establishing Religious Freedom have stood at the center of our understanding of religious liberty and the First Amendment. Jefferson’s expansive vision—including his insistence that political freedom and free thought would be at risk if we did not keep government out of the church and church out of government—enjoyed a near consensus of support at the Supreme Court and among historians, until Justice William Rehnquist called reliance on Jefferson "demonstrably incorrect." Since then, Rehnquist’s call has been taken up by a bevy of jurists and academics anxious to encourage renewed government involvement with religion. In Religious Freedom: Jefferson’s Legacy, America’s Creed, the historian and lawyer John Ragosta offers a vigorous defense of Jefferson’s advocacy for a strict separation of church and state. Beginning with a close look at Jefferson’s own religious evolution, Ragosta shows that deep religious beliefs were at the heart of Jefferson’s views on religious freedom. Basing his analysis on that Jeffersonian vision, Ragosta redefines our understanding of how and why the First Amendment was adopted. He shows how the amendment’s focus on maintaining the authority of states to regulate religious freedom demonstrates that a very strict restriction on federal action was intended. Ultimately revealing that the great sage demanded a firm separation of church and state but never sought a wholly secular public square, Ragosta provides a new perspective on Jefferson, the First Amendment, and religious liberty within the United States.

Download or read book Church State and Freedom written by Leo Pfeffer and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2018-05-02 with total page 848 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "I believe that complete separation of church and state is one of those miraculous things which can be best for religion and best for the state, and the best for those who are religious and those who are not religious." - Leo Pfeffer Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. These sixteen words epitomize a radical experiment unique in human history . . . It is the purpose of this book to examine how this experiment came to be made, what are the implications and consequences of its application to democratic living in America today, and what are the forces seeking to frustrate and defeat that experiment. (From the Foreword)

Download or read book The Myth of American Religious Freedom written by David Sehat and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-01-14 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the battles over religion and politics in America, both liberals and conservatives often appeal to history. Liberals claim that the Founders separated church and state. But for much of American history, David Sehat writes, Protestant Christianity was intimately intertwined with the state. Yet the past was not the Christian utopia that conservatives imagine either. Instead, a Protestant moral establishment prevailed, using government power to punish free thinkers and religious dissidents. In The Myth of American Religious Freedom, Sehat provides an eye-opening history of religion in public life, overturning our most cherished myths. Originally, the First Amendment applied only to the federal government, which had limited authority. The Protestant moral establishment ruled on the state level. Using moral laws to uphold religious power, religious partisans enforced a moral and religious orthodoxy against Catholics, Jews, Mormons, agnostics, and others. Not until 1940 did the U.S. Supreme Court extend the First Amendment to the states. As the Supreme Court began to dismantle the connections between religion and government, Sehat argues, religious conservatives mobilized to maintain their power and began the culture wars of the last fifty years. To trace the rise and fall of this Protestant establishment, Sehat focuses on a series of dissenters--abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, socialist Eugene V. Debs, and many others. Shattering myths held by both the left and right, David Sehat forces us to rethink some of our most deeply held beliefs. By showing the bad history used on both sides, he denies partisans a safe refuge with the Founders.

Download or read book The Production of American Religious Freedom written by Finbarr Curtis and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2016-08-02 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Americans love religious freedom. Few agree, however, about what they mean by either “religion” or “freedom.” Rather than resolve these debates, Finbarr Curtis argues that there is no such thing as religious freedom. Lacking any consistent content, religious freedom is a shifting and malleable rhetoric employed for a variety of purposes. While Americans often think of freedom as the right to be left alone, the free exercise of religion works to produce, challenge, distribute, and regulate different forms of social power. The book traces shifts in the notion of religious freedom in America from The Second Great Awakening, to the fiction of Louisa May Alcott and the films of D.W. Griffith, through William Jennings Bryan and the Scopes Trial, and up to debates over the Tea Party to illuminate how Protestants have imagined individual and national forms of identity. A chapter on Al Smith considers how the first Catholic presidential nominee of a major party challenged Protestant views about the separation of church and state. Moving later in the twentieth century, the book analyzes Malcolm X’s more sweeping rejection of Christian freedom in favor of radical forms of revolutionary change. The final chapters examine how contemporary controversies over intelligent design and the claims of corporations to exercise religion are at the forefront of efforts to shift regulatory power away from the state and toward private institutions like families, churches, and corporations. The volume argues that religious freedom is produced within competing visions of governance in a self-governing nation.

Download or read book Establishing Religious Freedom written by Thomas E. Buckley and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2014-01-13 with total page 538 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The significance of the Virginia Statute for Establishing Religious Freedom goes far beyond the borders of the Old Dominion. Its influence ultimately extended to the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the separation of church and state. In his latest book, Thomas Buckley tells the story of the statute, beginning with its background in the struggles of the colonial dissenters against an oppressive Church of England. When the Revolution forced the issue of religious liberty, Thomas Jefferson drafted his statute and James Madison guided its passage through the state legislature. Displacing an established church by instituting religious freedom, the Virginia statute provided the most substantial guarantees of religious liberty of any state in the new nation. The statute's implementation, however, proved to be problematic. Faced with a mandate for strict separation of church and state--and in an atmosphere of sweeping evangelical Christianity--Virginians clashed over numerous issues, including the legal ownership of church property, the incorporation of churches and religious groups, Sabbath observance, protection for religious groups, Bible reading in school, and divorce laws. Such debates pitted churches against one another and engaged Virginia’s legal system for a century and a half. Fascinating history in itself, the effort to implement Jefferson’s statute has even broader significance in its anticipation of the conflict that would occupy the whole country after the Supreme Court nationalized the religion clause of the First Amendment in the 1940s.

Download or read book Law Religion and Freedom written by W. Cole Durham Jr and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-08 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines major conceptual challenges confronting freedom of religion or belief in contemporary settings. It will be a valuable resource for students, academics, and policy-makers with an interest in law, religion, and human rights.

Download or read book God and Government written by Rev. Barry W. Lynn and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on 2015-08-04 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A central player in every major church-state-separation battle for decades, the Rev. Barry W. Lynn understands the complexities of this divisive issue like few others. As a long-time activist, a civil rights lawyer, and an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ, he offers a unique perspective and a wealth of experience on church-state controversies. In this lively book, he has compiled his writings from various sources to explore in depth the many ways religious extremists have attempted to erode individual liberties. The topics range from publicly-promoted prayer to efforts to undermine public education and replace it with taxpayer-subsidized vouchers for religious schools, interfering with end-of-life and reproductive rights, censorship, and belligerence directed against nonbelievers and minorities. Lynn concludes that the ultimate goal of these extremist forces—consisting mainly of the Protestant Religious Right and the Roman Catholic hierarchy—is the creation of a corporate theocracy, a decidedly undemocratic system of government in which nonconservative Christians, along with humanist, feminists, and the LGBTQ community, are relegated to second-class status in America.

Download or read book The Tragedy of Religious Freedom written by Marc O. DeGirolami and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-06-10 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When it comes to questions of religion, legal scholars face a predicament. They often expect to resolve dilemmas according to general principles of equality, neutrality, or the separation of church and state. But such abstractions fail to do justice to the untidy welter of values at stake. Offering new views of how to understand and protect religious freedom in a democracy, The Tragedy of Religious Freedom challenges the idea that matters of law and religion should be referred to far-flung theories about the First Amendment. Examining a broad array of contemporary and more established Supreme Court rulings, Marc DeGirolami explains why conflicts implicating religious liberty are so emotionally fraught and deeply contested. Twenty-first-century realities of pluralism have outrun how scholars think about religious freedom, DeGirolami asserts. Scholars have not been candid enough about the tragic nature of the conflicts over religious liberty—the clash of opposing interests and aspirations they entail, and the limits of human reason to resolve intractable differences. The Tragedy of Religious Freedom seeks to turn our attention from abstracted, absolute values to concrete, historical realities. Social history, characterized by the struggles of lawyers engaged in the details of irreducible conflicts, represents the most promising avenue to negotiate legal conflicts over religion. In this volume, DeGirolami offers an approach to understanding religious liberty that is neither rigidly systematic nor ad hoc, but a middle path grounded in a pluralistic and historically informed perspective.

Download or read book Religious Freedom and the Constitution written by Christopher L. Eisgruber and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010-04-10 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religion has become a charged token in a politics of division. In disputes about faith-based social services, public money for religious schools, the Pledge of Allegiance, Ten Commandments monuments, the theory of evolution, and many other topics, angry contestation threatens to displace America's historic commitment to religious freedom. Part of the problem, the authors argue, is that constitutional analysis of religious freedom has been hobbled by the idea of "a wall of separation" between church and state. That metaphor has been understood to demand that religion be treated far better than other concerns in some contexts, and far worse in others. Sometimes it seems to insist on both contrary forms of treatment simultaneously. Missing has been concern for the fair and equal treatment of religion. In response, the authors offer an understanding of religious freedom called Equal Liberty. Equal Liberty is guided by two principles. First, no one within the reach of the Constitution ought to be devalued on account of the spiritual foundation of their commitments. Second, all persons should enjoy broad rights of free speech, personal autonomy, associative freedom, and private property. Together, these principles are generous and fair to a wide range of religious beliefs and practices. With Equal Liberty as their guide, the authors offer practical, moderate, and appealing terms for the settlement of many hot-button issues that have plunged religious freedom into controversy. Their book calls Americans back to the project of finding fair terms of cooperation for a religiously diverse people, and it offers a valuable set of tools for working toward that end.

Download or read book Religious Freedom and the Supreme Court written by Ronald Bruce Flowers and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 1224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is clear, relevant, and an essential text for the twenty-first century.

Download or read book Secularism and Freedom of Conscience written by Jocelyn Maclure and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-24 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Secularism: the definition of this word is as practical and urgent as income inequalities or the paths to sustainable development. In this wide-ranging analysis, Jocelyn Maclure and Charles Taylor provide a clearly reasoned, articulate account of the two main principles of secularism—equal respect, and freedom of conscience—and its two operative modes—separation of Church (or mosque or temple) and State, and State neutrality vis-à-vis religions. But more crucially, they make the powerful argument that in our ever more religiously diverse, politically interconnected world, secularism, properly understood, may offer the only path to religious and philosophical freedom. Secularism and Freedom of Conscience grew out of a very real problem—Quebec’s need for guidelines to balance the equal respect due to all citizens with the right to religious freedom. But the authors go further, rethinking secularism in light of other critical issues of our time. The relationship between religious beliefs and deeply-held secular convictions, the scope of the free exercise of religion, and the place of religion in the public sphere are aspects of the larger challenge Maclure and Taylor address: how to manage moral and religious diversity in a free society. Secularism, they show, is essential to any liberal democracy in which citizens adhere to a plurality of conceptions of what gives meaning and direction to human life. The working model the authors construct in this nuanced account is capacious enough to accommodate difference and freedom of conscience, while holding out hope for a world in which diversity no longer divides us.

Download or read book Freedom Faith and Dogma written by V. S. Soloviev and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of works by nineteenth-century Russian religious philosopher V. S. Soloviev, critic of secularization, anti-Semitism, and the religious life of his time.

Download or read book The Impossibility of Religious Freedom written by Winnifred Fallers Sullivan and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-24 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Constitution may guarantee it. But religious freedom in America is, in fact, impossible. So argues this timely and iconoclastic work by law and religion scholar Winnifred Sullivan. Sullivan uses as the backdrop for the book the trial of Warner vs. Boca Raton, a recent case concerning the laws that protect the free exercise of religion in America. The trial, for which the author served as an expert witness, concerned regulations banning certain memorials from a multiconfessional nondenominational cemetery in Boca Raton, Florida. The book portrays the unsuccessful struggle of Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish families in Boca Raton to preserve the practice of placing such religious artifacts as crosses and stars of David on the graves of the city-owned burial ground. Sullivan demonstrates how, during the course of the proceeding, citizens from all walks of life and religious backgrounds were harassed to define just what their religion is. She argues that their plight points up a shocking truth: religion cannot be coherently defined for the purposes of American law, because everyone has different definitions of what religion is. Indeed, while religious freedom as a political idea was arguably once a force for tolerance, it has now become a force for intolerance, she maintains. A clear-eyed look at the laws created to protect religious freedom, this vigorously argued book offers a new take on a right deemed by many to be necessary for a free democratic society. It will have broad appeal not only for religion scholars, but also for anyone interested in law and the Constitution. Featuring a new preface by the author, The Impossibility of Religious Freedom offers a new take on a right deemed by many to be necessary for a free democratic society.