Conclusion

One need not turn back many pages of history to recognize the importance and delicacy of the problems presented by the relation of religion to government. The many faces of these issues have been making recent newspaper headlines in profusion. Some of them are beyond judicial cognizance: for example, those so well recorded in Mr. White’s book on the 1960 presidential election. ⁴¹³ There are others that may or may not become appropriate subjects for judicial scrutiny, such as the continuing question whether the national government can contribute financially to parochial education, directly or indirectly. (Anyone suggesting that the answer, as a matter of constitutional law, is clear one way or the other is either deluding or deluded.) Fortunately, the church-state problems in this country have not been those of countries like Spain and Colombia, where intolerance—indeed, persecution—is a policy of state and church in combination. But these countries provide ample contemporary evidence of the wisdom of the framers of the first amendment in their objectives of keeping the church free from domination by government and the state free from alliance with religion. There is little quarrel, today, about the goals to be achieved by the religion clauses of the first amendment. The problem that has bemused and confused the Court has been that of stating appropriate principles to serve as means to agreed-upon ends. But there has been no consistency in the judicial opinions of the Court. The seeming simplicity of the “absolutist” construction of the first amendment is only too patently disingenuous. The method of weighing constitutional objectives in order to choose among them affords no guidance for further action, except on what Holmes called a “pots and pans” basis. The action-belief dichotomy is obviously inadequate to attainment of the stated goals of the religion clauses.