What factors were driving our founding fathers when writing the Constitution? One critical factor was taxation without representation. However, they were also determined to establish the first secular state in a world of theocracies.
What has happened since then? During the 20th century, the beliefs of legal secularists and values evangelicals have been battling via the Supreme Court to sustain or undo what our founding fathers established.
During these recent battles, how did the presence of Justice Sandra Day O’Conner affect the Supreme Court’s decisions? How might near term changes to the membership of the Supreme Court affect the secular state established by our founding fathers?
For more on our founding fathers, the battle of the secularists and evangelicals, and what changes to the Supreme Court will lead to, please listen to this podcast from an interview of Noah Feldman by The Young Turks.
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See Noah Fledman's white paper on, THE INTELLECTUAL ORIGINS OF THE ESTABLISHMENT CLAUSE, "In this Article, Professor Noah Feldman gives an account of the intellectual origins of the Establishment Clause and analyzes the ideas that drove the debates over church and state in eighteenth-century America. ... Yet despite the manifest importance of what the Framers thought
about church and state, in recent years there has been no attempt in the academic literature to set out a comprehensive history of the ideas that led to the emergence of the Establishment Clause."