ABSTRACT
There are few issues so likely to generate heat rather than light as the question of the proper line between the realm of the state and that of the church. As Father John Courtney Murray has noted : “Every historian who has catalogued the historical factors which made for religious liberty and separation of church and state in America would doubtless agree that these institutions came into being under the pressure of their necessity for the public peace.” The Supreme Court’s concern with the religion clauses of the first amendment begins, for all practical purposes, with the case of Reynolds v. United States, where the Court first adopted the Jeffersonian statement that the amendment erected “a wall of separation between church and State.” In the Supreme Court the question presented was only whether the utilization of state funds for private uses controvened the mandate of the due process clause of the fourteenth amendment.
