ABSTRACT
Over the past 20 years, debates over church-state issues have been a prominent feature of American politics. Religious diversity intrudes into these debates because it changes the nature of one of the most common tactics of those who advocate accommodation between church and state-the attempt to include non-Christian elements in religious displays. In the first major study of public opinion on church-state issues, Jelen and Wilcox reported that the general public and elites alike support separation of church and state in the abstract but not in the concrete. Jelen and Wilcox included in their study a survey of residents of the Washington, DC metro area in 1993. A religious conflict model might suggest that when the hegemony of majority religious groups is threatened by the rapid influx of those with sharply different beliefs and traditions, religious conflict might result. Orthodox Christians may see growing diversity as threatening their religious hegemony and as undermining the nation's status as a "Christian nation".
