No "Religious Free" Zones

Illicit Distortions Of  Church and State

In his book A History of the American People, Paul Johnson confronts a modern fallacy.  In the United States it has become increasingly the case that the separation of church and state means that the state must be a thoroughly secular institution. 

This misconstruction has been eagerly picked up and "run" in most secular states in the West.  Philosophers like Jurgen Habermas in Germany has argued strongly for a secular (that is, atheistic) public square where all philosophies and views can be discussed and debated on neutral ground.  Most folk today who are interested in the debates over church vs. state accept a fundamental premise of this view which is that the doctrines of the separation of church and state necessarily mean that the state is a secular referee--and, therefore, neutral and indifferent towards religious belief. 

The effect of this has been to shove religious beliefs and doctrines out of the public square and chain them to the kitchen table.  Paul Johnson argues that this is a radical distortion of what originally was meant by the "separation of church and state". 

The First Amendment . . . has been widely, almost wilfully, misunderstood in recent years, and interpreted as meaning that the federal government is forbidden by the Constitution to countenance or subsidize even indirectly the practice of religion.  That would have astonished and angered the Founding Fathers.  What the guarantee means is that Congress may not set up a state religion on the lines of the Church of England, 'as by law established'.  It was an anti-establishment clause.

The second half of the guarantee means that Congress may not interfere with the practice of any religion, and it could be argued that recent interpretations of the First Amenment run directly contrary to the plain and obvious meaning of this guarantee, and that for a court to forbid people to hold prayhers in public school is a flagrant breach of the Constitution. 

In effect, the First Amendment forbade Congress to favor one church , or religious sect, over another.  It certainly did not inhibit Congress from identifying itself with the religious impulse as such or from authorizing religious practices where all could agree on their desirability.  [Paul Johnson, A History of the American People (New York/NY: Harper Perennial, 1999), p. 209.] 

Pushback against construing the public square to be necessarily a religious free zone is well passed due.