"The indispensable basis of democracy": American catholicism, the church-state debate, and the soul of American Liberalism, 1920-1929

ean John C. Jeffries and Professor James E. Ryan argue that
the United States Supreme Court’s Establishment Clause
cases should be understood “as if they were products of political
contests among various interest groups, both religious and secular,
with competing positions on the proper relation of church and
state.”3
Establishment Clause jurisprudence therefore must be read
as the product of a “subconstitutional—which is to say, political—
contest among religious and secular interests with . . . ideological
commitments to separation of church and state.”4
This jurisprudence, in other words, is not a hermetically sealed body of constitutional law. Beneath the appeals to history, original intent, and constitutional necessity that inform readings of the Establishment
Clause lie normative assumptions about the proper relationship of
religion to the state. Constitutional interpretation is thus subsumed
into a larger political debate about the meaning of American liberalism and the role of religion in shaping the meaning of democracy.
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