Giving Up On the Founding
The Separation of Church and State and the Writing of Establishment Clause History
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6212944 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Christopher S Grenda (City University of New York, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2013 |
| Volume | 6 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 402-434 |
| Publication date | 2013-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Politics and Religion (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1755-0491 • E-ISSN: 1755-0483 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s1755048312000685 |
| OpenAlex | W2329889920 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 42 |
Examination of the First Amendment's establishment clause in the post World War II period is unique in American constitutional interpretation because virtually all voices had agreed on one point, originalism. Few if any significant writers on the establishment clause had doubted the centrality of the founders' original intent for interpreting the clause's meaning. Yet this now has changed. Unlike their predecessors, leading advocates of church-state separation have now moved away from an original meaning interpretation of the establishment clause. Yet these separationists continue to try to ground their normative policy prescriptions in establishment clause mandates. They attempt this balancing act by employing narrative strategies of evolutionary processes in history. They do not simply track changes in constitutional doctrine, but characterize changes yielding greater separation between church and state through the nation's history as incipient in the Republic's founding, an originally inchoate church-state principle only fully formed through historical evolution. In the process, they sweep myriad separationist ideas into their progressively evolving narratives which have never been enunciated as law. Their accounts thus often reflect less an attempt to track historical developments in fundamental law than an attempt to construct fundamental law narratives. These attempts highlight persistent historical problems in the separationist endeavor that require attention if the evolutionary narratives of leading separationist are to shape the field of establishment clause history
Constitutional law · Doctrine · Dormant Commerce Clause · Epistemology · Establishment Clause · First amendment · Interpretation (philosophy · Linguistics · Meaning (existential · Narrative · Normative · Original meaning · Originalism · Political science · Politics · Separation of church and state · Sociology · State (computer science · Supreme court · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Catholicism and Religious Studies · Computer Science · History · Law · Mormonism, Religion, and History · Philosophy
The end of liberalism
The radicalism of the American Revolution
John Locke's Liberalism
Separation of Church and State
Empire Of Liberty
Justice as Fairness
Religion and the State
Equal Treatment of Religion in a Pluralistic Society
James Madison on Religious Liberty
Natural Law and Moral Philosophy
Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation between Church and State
The Godless Constitution
American Scripture
Capitalism and a New Social Order
Original Intent
The Establishment Clause
The Dawn of Religious Freedom in South Carolina
Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation between Church and State
The Jeffersonian Persuasion
Originalism in American Law and Politics
The Lustre of Our Country
Interpreting the Constitution. The Debate over Original Intent
A New Perspective on Jefferson's Views on Church-State Relations
Christian Perspectives on Legal Thought
An essay concerning human understanding
American Scripture
Religion under the State Constitutions, 1776-1800
Thinking Historically about Diversity
Church, State, and Original Intent
The Jeffersonian Persuasion
White Collar Productivity
Law and Religion
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |