"Scholarship" is a savage device in the wrong hands. A line of Supreme Court cases beginning in 1947 (of which we can say the current court is not held in thrall) owe much to Justice Hugo Black, once a Klansman, undoubtedly anti-Catholic.
His "scholarship" in Everson v. Board of Education of Ewing Township forbade a New Jersey school district from reimbursing parents for the transportation costs of sending their children to Catholic schools.
Cited prominently by Justice Black is Thomas Jefferson's infamously misinterpreted call for a "wall of separation" between church and state - a phrase contained in an 1802 missive seeking political support from New England Baptists.
These Baptists, according to a forthcoming book by American University Professor Daniel Dreisbach, did wish for the disestablishment of the Congregationalists. But Jefferson intended no divorcement of religion from public life. And neither did the Baptists, who rejected Jefferson's ill-conceived term.
Might we abide with U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Joseph Story, who said the Establishment Clause leaves to the states the intersections of religion and public life. But as for the role of religion, Story advised it would be prominent:
"An attempt to level all religions, and to make it a matter of state policy to hold all in utter indifference, would have created universal disapprobation, if not universal indignation."
People who are informed by religious principles, and thereby offer their ideas in the marketplace where a republic makes its choices, enrich the debate. We can ill-afford to build walls of separation against them.
