The Many Meanings of Separation

Abstract

Separation of Church and State is a learned, informative, and fascinating book, a must-read for anyone interested in religious liberty in the United States. The broad religious and political movements Professor Hamburger reviews have been described before for other purposes, but they are little known and under-appreciated. Many of his illuminating details are new, and his focus on the evolving meaning of of church and state is new and important. The book is also frustrating, maddening, and ultimately flawed. It treats its central concept as a term of art without seriously defining it. When Hamburger's definition of is finally teased out, it is extreme and unusual, with hostility to religion as a central element. For Hamburger, of church and state means hostile efforts to control religion and limit its influence. Under this definition, there were no separationists among the supporters of the First Amendment. In Hamburger's view, is a nineteenth-century movement, originating in anti-Catholicism, later expanding or shifting to include hostility to all organized religion, and finally becoming the dominant understanding of church-state relations both in the Supreme Court and in public opinion. Hamburger offers ample support for something like his meaning of separation. Hundreds of pages detail hostile, anti-Catholic, or antireligious usages of in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. When he then repeatedly asserts that the Supreme Court and most Americans have adopted separation as their constitutional understanding of church-state relations today, he plainly means that they adopted one of these earlier understandings that he docu-