Military Review English Edition March-April 2015 | Page 89

FORCE AND FAITH

to the application of the establishment clause to state
law through the Supreme Court’s decision in Everson
v. Board of Education in 1947.22 Such laws included those espousing state-established churches, tax
support to churches, religious tests for office, which
were in effect in 11 of the 13 original colonies in the
late eighteenth century, and even fines for irregular
church attendance.23
Even though the national government of the time
did not attempt to instill morality or virtue within the
citizenry through lawmaking, many of the Founders
had strong convictions that religion was essential in
shaping a moral citizenry. Since many eighteenth-century Americans became literate by reading the Bible,
Alexis de Tocqueville noted that religion “directs the
customs of the community, and by regulating domestic life, it regulates the state.”24 While the government
did not sanction a particular religion, many of the
Founders recognized that religion was an indispensable part, and asset, to a democratic republic.25 The
importance of religion to republican government
was captured by George Washington in his farewell
address where he cautioned that “reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality
can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”26 The
First Amendment and the religious marketplace
in early America created a nonreligious religiousness—a state in which religion influenced the political dialogue of the community, but did so from a
position of nonestablishment.
Balancing the two pillars of the First Amendment—
nonestablishment and free exercise—has been an
uneasy journey in the course of American political
history, demonstrating the complexity of mixing religion and politics. The high point of America’s religiosity
in the twentieth century occurred in the 1950s when
the phrase “In God We Trust” was added to the Pledge
of Allegiance and paper currency, and measures of
religious observance such as church attendance were at
levels not seen since.27 However, the post-New Deal era
also ushered in new complexities in combining religious
traditions with the features of the modern republic.
For one, the incorporation of the establishment clause
of the First Amendment with the landmark 1947 case
Everson v. Board of Education meant that state and
local governments now faced increasing limitations on
aid to religious organizations.
MILITARY REVIEW  March-April 2015

Second, the national government was increasingly active in the provision of services like education,
health, and charity that were previously the province of
religious organizations.28 Third, government regulation
of personal sexual morality drew religious groups into
the political arena because of the significance of sexual
morality to many religious denominations.29
The Supreme Court has frequently been the
arbiter in addressing the tension that is inherent
in the First Amendment between preserving both
nonestablishment and free exercise. As Justice
William Rehnquist noted, decisions such as those
in the landmark case of Lemon v. Kurtzman, which
imparted a three-part test to gauge the compatibility of laws with the establishment and free exercise
clauses of the First Amendment, sometimes lead to
further entanglement between state and church.30
For instance, the Court has decided that a “state may
pay for bus transportation to religious schools—but
may not pay for bus transportation from the parochial school to the public zoo or natural history museum
for a field trip.”31 In many cases, restricting the First
Amendment to the private sphere may restrict free
exercise, but using statutory authority to buttress
religious organizations or purposes is a violation of
the establishment