Facts and Fictions About the History of Separation of Church and State

Abstract

In the past decade, a veritable cottage industry of important new books, articles, briefs, and judicial opinions has emerged devoted to the history of separation of church and state.1 We now Know a great deal more about the history of separationist rhetoric from Thomas Jefferson's famous 1802 Letter to the Danbury Baptist Association to Justice Hugo Black's opinion in the 1947 Supreme Court case of Everson v. Board of Education. We know more about the odious manipulation of separationist rhetoric by the Ku Klux Klan and other nativist groups against Catholics, Jews, and other minority faiths and immigrant groups in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And we now see more clearly than before that Justice Black drew some