Church, the State, and Mrs. McCollum

Authors

Clarence Emmett Manion, Notre Dame Law School

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1948

Publication Information

23 Notre Dame Law. 456 (1947-1948).

Abstract

On March 8, 1948 the Supreme Court of the United States decided in substance that this language prohibits the tax-supported city school systems of the State of Illinois from assisting and encouraging general religious instruction. Just how a constitutional restriction against specified congressional action can possibly impede the activity of a local Illinois school board is an inglorious mystery of modern constitutional construction.

In one way or another however, and for one reason or many, the Court decided eight to one that when the First Amendment says "Congress" it means, among other things, a local school board and when it says "an establishment of Religion", it outlaws the approval by such board of any activity during school hours which is calculated to promote the interest of public school children in the existence and power of God.

If, as one glib commentator has perspicaciously said the Supreme Court in this case had merely "upheld the Constitutional right of Jimmie McCollum, age 12, to go to hell", the decision would have sounded no general alarm. But the conclusions of the court are definitely revolutionary in at least two important respects.

The first and most important of these conclusions is the judicial determination that religion and American government have nothing in common and that both must henceforth operate in unrelated spheres behind an impregnable wall of separation.

The second conclusion solemnizes the unfortunate miscegenetic marriage of the First and Fourteenth Amendments, a union, which for some unstated reason the present Supreme Court has sought to effect throughout the past seven years. In the legal and logical order the second conclusion precedes the. first. A prior examination of its premises should consequently turn up clues to the Court's tortuous but nevertheless certain determination that God must get out of the American Public School.

Comments

Reprinted with permission of Notre Dame Law Review (previously Notre Dame Lawyer).

Recommended Citation

Clarence E. Manion, Church, the State, and Mrs. McCollum, 23 Notre Dame Law. 456 (1947-1948)..
Available at: https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/law_faculty_scholarship/1018