Religion and the State

While over eighty percent of the people of the United States identify themselves with what has come to be called the "Judeo-Christian" religion, there have always been inhabitants who did not belong to that tradition. Most notable have been Native Americans or American Indians, many of whom did convert to Christianity, but others, down to the present, have retained their own rituals and traditions. They have often represented anomalies to the courts. In one of the most celebrated instances, for example, the United States Supreme Court in Employment Division v. Smith (1990) ruled against two Native American drug rehabilitation counselors who were fired because they ingested peyote during ritual observances.

Some of the founders anticipated a day when citizens from a variety of religious heritages would test the boundary of the biblical tradition. Already during the debates over religious freedom in Virginia in the 1780s, Thomas Jefferson argued that the legislature was trying to protect, and should protect, "the Jew and Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination." Through the next two and a half centuries "Mahometans" and "Hindoos" were few in number. After the U.S. Congress changed the immigration laws in 1965, however, great numbers of immigrants came from Asia, Africa, and especially nations where Muslims predominated.

Some came from places where religious practices were proscribed, but others had the experience of polities in which religion and regime had never been separated, as is the case with most areas dominated by Muslims. Their views on "religion and the state" did not awaken much curiosity until a number of terrorist acts, especially the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001, and the increasing involvement in Middle Eastern conflicts, as between Arabs and Jews, led many non-Muslim citizens to be suspicious and to resist efforts by Muslim populations to have some of their controversial practices protected by law.

The presence of the varieties of immigrants from other than Europe and the increase in both pluralism and in the demands for personal freedom led to many testings of the conventional boundaries of "church and state" in law and in custom. Not all the tensions among citizen groups resulted in legal battles, but across the spectrum from neighborhoods surrounding mosques to high governmental administrators and strategists, Muslims found themselves having to demonstrate that they were full participants in the American complex.

Given the suddenness of the arrival of new immigrants and the global conflicts reflected among American citizens, one might have expected that confrontations would have become menacing and even bloody. Yet gross violations of citizen rights were few, and most of the new Americans, whether or not they felt themselves to belong to the longer tradition called "Judeo-Christian," adapted to their new environment. As is often the case with converts to a cause or new arrivals to a culture, most went out of their way to advertise their attachment to the United States, even when and perhaps because its legal tradition and culture worked to keep Madison's line of distinction between religion and civil authority clear. And, like so many before them, they came to affirm America's "civil religion," were ready to sing "God Bless America," and to recite the Pledge of Allegiance concerning "one nation, under God.…"