ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the religious views of the Justices who comprised the Warren Court. It discusses the development of the constitutional law of church-state relations down to the time when Earl Warren became Chief Justice in 1953. The chapter describes the Warren Court’s Sunday closing law decisions and the reaction provoked by those rulings, which upheld business regulations that benefited Christians while burdening Jews and other Sabbatarians. It examines the Warren Court’s rulings prohibiting religious exercises in public schools. The chapter explains that despite the outrage provoked by those decisions, all proposals to overturn them by constitutional amendment failed. The Warren Court eventually adopted the neutrality view, but only after holding that laws requiring all businesses to close on the Christian Sabbath were constitutional. The religious divisions within American society and the conflicts among religious groups that unsettled American politics necessarily affected judicial interpretation of the First Amendment’s religion clauses.
