Separation Anxieties: A Comment on Weil’s Penalties for the Violation of Separation

Abstract Professor Weil’s thesis seems largely correct with respect to the United States, whose law on religious establishment I regularly teach. Funding is central to American debates over religious establishment. The fight over religious establishments in Virginia, which inspired both James Madison’s “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments” and Thomas Jefferson’s “An Act for Establishing Religious Freedom,” was over whether persons could be forced to pay taxes to support religious instruction. Financial concerns were at the root of church-state debates in the nineteenth century, when Protestants repeatedly rebuffed Catholics who wanted funding for Catholic private schools. Many state constitutions still have what are known as mini-Blaine Amendments that forbid public funding for religious institutions. Whether proponents of a strong separation between church and state in the United States are fighting the same battles as proponents of a strong separation of church and state in France is nevertheless problematic. The French revolutionaries had to subordinate a reactionary church. The American revolutionaries merely had to negotiate peace treaties among the different sects that supported the Declaration of Independence. Separation of church and state in the United States is best conceptualized as a division of labor among liberal institutions rather than a means for purging anti-liberal religion from the liberal public sphere.