Thanksgiving is a time to be grateful for the blessings we have received, but also an opportunity to reflect on the traditions we have inherited—which are among the greatest of those blessings—and to ask ourselves whether they are being properly preserved.

Thanksgiving and the Constitution

by Carson Holloway

Strict separation of church and state would require us to throw out Thanksgiving as a religious holiday proclaimed by the president. Instead, we should embrace Thanksgiving and throw out strict separationism as a misguided interpretation of the Constitution.

America’s long and venerable tradition of presidential proclamations of thanksgiving—which reaches from Barack Obama all the way back to George Washington—is a standing rebuke to the modern Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

The Establishment Clause famously provides that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” From the founding to the present, Americans of all points of view have agreed that this provision forbids the creation of a state church or an official religion.

For the last sixty-five years, however, the Supreme Court has held that the meaning of the clause goes further, that it in fact requires a “strict separation of church and state.” The Court announced this meaning in 1947 with its decision inEverson v. Board of Education, it began using it in the 1960s to invalidate acts of government designed to support religion, and it has held to it resolutely ever since, despite strong criticism from sources both on the Court and off of it.

According to the theory of strict separation, the government is forbidden not only to set up an official church or religion, but also to do anything in support of religious belief. It may not invoke its authority on behalf of any particular religion, and it may not even act to foster religious belief in general. To use the language of the Court, the Establishment Clause requires that the government be neutral not only among sects, but also between religion and non-religion.

Strict separation’s strictness, its utter intolerance of any governmental affirmation of religion, also arises from its insistence that government may not deploy its power or even its prestige on behalf of religion. According to the Court, violations of the Establishment Clause need not be predicated on coercion. Government may not require religious observance, but neither can it merely encourage such observance. Thus, in the 1960s, the Court threw out exercises of prayer and devotional Bible reading in public schools, despite the fact that these activities were acknowledged to be voluntary. According to the Court, they were violations of the Establishment Clause even though students who did not wish to take part were free to decline to do so.

Strict separationism presents itself as based on history. It claims, in fact, to be the result of an inquiry into the original understanding of the Establishment Clause. American liberals generally dismiss originalism as a mode of interpretation, but they embrace it enthusiastically here, where it seems to yield results to their liking. Seems is the operative word, however, because strict separationism depends on a tendentious reading of the historical evidence.

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