The Third Disestablishment

Steven K. Green, the author of several well-received books on U.S. church-state relations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, has now turned his attention to the post-World War II period. In The Third Disestablishment, he examines the critical three-decade period, beginning with Everson v. Board of Education (1947), in which the Supreme Court effectively ended teacher-led prayer and Bible-reading in the public schools, imposed new restrictions on the public funding of religious entities, and barred religious groups from censoring films and literature. This is familiar territory for law and religion scholars, but Green argues persuasively that previous studies have either missed or mischaracterized crucial aspects of the story. His revisionist reading of the material is both subtle and profound. Green’s first innovative move is to conceptualize the postwar justices as participants in a broader societal debate concerning the role of religion in American public life. The 1940s and 1950s, he points out, witnessed an explosion of popular and academic commentary on church-state issues: popular periodicals devoted space to such seemingly arcane subjects as the appointment of a U.S. emissary to the Vatican, and books dealing with church-state themes often became surprise bestsellers. Green adroitly maps the resulting debates, showing how the key players—from Paul Blanshard, to John Courtney Murray, to Reinhold Niebuhr—adjusted and refined their arguments as they struggled to keep pace with a rapidly changing cultural and political environment. More to the point, he demonstrates that this elite-level discussion effectively set the terms of the constitutional debate. Far from writing on a blank slate, the justices of the Vinson and Warren Courts were forced to work out the meaning of a principle—church-state separation—that had become “embedded in the national ethos” even as disagreement about its meaning abounded (p. 11).

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