Document Type
Article
Publication Date
1986
Publication Information
18 Conn. L. Rev. 827 (1986)
Abstract
Our Framers through the Establishment Clause sought to prevent the government from preferring one religious sect to another. However, the Supreme Court in Everson v. Board of Education abandoned that meaning of nonestablishment and created a general prohibition on all nondiscriminatory aid to religion, a decision later reinforced in Lemon v. Kurtzman. This Article discusses the Founder’s worldview and looks at other Establishment Clause cases to illustrate that the historical evidence is inconsistent with Everson. Rather, the founders intended to assure that religion would be aided only on a nondiscriminatory, or sect-neutral, basis and does not stand for the proposition that religion cannot be aided at all by state or federal government.
Recommended Citation
Gerard V. Bradley,
Imagining the Past and Remembering the Future: The Supreme Court's History of the Establishment Clause,
18 Conn. L. Rev. 827 (1986).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/law_faculty_scholarship/93
Included in
Constitutional Law Commons, Courts Commons, Legal History Commons
Comments
Reprinted with permission of the Connecticut Law Review.