ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Zorach v. Clauson (1952); the US Supreme Court ruled that students at public schools could be excused from school one hour per week for the purpose of attending religious observance and education off school premises. The Court found that an absolute separation of the governmental and religious spheres, without exception, evinced an alienating, "hostile, suspicious, and even unfriendly" stance toward religion. The Court construed a thoroughgoing lack of cooperation toward religion as hostility and as favoring nonbelievers. The three dissenting justices (Hugo L. Black, Felix Frankfurter, and Robert H. Jackson) were not persuaded that moving the religious instruction offschool premises crucially distinguished Zorach from Mc- Collum, or that the issue of coercion was adequately understood by the majority. The Establishment Clause turned on whether the state had "entered this forbidden field" of entanglement of church and state at all, the slightest entry being "not separation but combination of Church and State." .
