normativity also limits our understanding of religiosity. Survey data show an increase in the number of Americans identifying as unaffiliated, a group researchers have begun calling the “nones” because they respond “none” when asked for their religious affiliation in studies and polls. According to the 2018 General Social Survey (GSS), Americans claiming no religion represent about 23.1 percent of the population, up from 21.6 percent in 2016.6 But as Russell Jeung and his colleagues point out in their writing on Chinese Americans, a rise in “nones” is not the same as an increase in nonbelief or nonbelonging. Jeung warns that “non-religiousness cannot be conflated with … secularism,” particularly in those faiths where religion is not carried out through prayer and congregational practice. Chinese Americans, for example, “do not believe in religion as much as they do religion.”7
In other words, the very theory of “nones” is itself influenced by Christian normativity. It assumes a norm of religiosity defined by congregational activity and worship. Yet an increase in “nones” does not indicate a net decrease in religiosity, as Jeung points out. Nor does it indicate that “religion” is giving way to “secularism” in any sense that changes the foundational role of Christianity in US law, society, and culture. Christianity remains embedded in US legal and social structures. The world is as modern as it has ever been; still, both in the US and abroad, religious and tribal identities are as strong and divisive as they have been in a century or more. Focusing on the decrease in the proportion of Americans who identify with a Christian faith also ignores the continuing increase in the number of adherents of other faiths, largely due to immigration. Moreover, “nones” of Christian origin continue to benefit from Christian privilege, and “nones” of other faiths do not.8
An Optical Illusion
As we have discussed, Christian privilege is often not apparent to those who benefit from it. The idea that there is equal religious freedom for all in the United States is an optical illusion. Optical illusions do two things: they prevent you from seeing what is right in front of you, and/or they distort the thing you are looking at so it appears to be something else. The optical illusion of American religious freedom begins with the idea that just writing it down makes it real. Since religious freedom is enshrined in the First Amendment of the Constitution, people assume that religious discrimination does not exist. The illusion is fed by the one of the United States’ grand narratives: that the nation was founded as a haven for those fleeing religious persecution, where all can worship freely and equally. The facts behind the illusion are very different. The Puritans created a society where Protestant Christianity was the norm, and where religious affiliation, like race, became a basis for exclusion and discrimination.9
One of the most powerful ways the optical illusion of religious freedom is perpetuated is through constant use of the phrase “separation of church and state.” This phrase is invoked in public debates about issues like prayer at government meetings or Nativity scenes on public property. It is often brought up as a way to push back against members of religious minorities who assert their First Amendment rights in public spaces—because Christians do not see the omnipresence of Christianity in those very same spaces. Many Americans erroneously believe that the words “separation of church and state” are found in the Constitution and/or the Declaration of Independence. The phrase actually comes from a letter President Thomas Jefferson wrote to a Baptist religious committee in Danbury, Connecticut, in 1802. Jefferson was responding to the Danbury Baptists’ concern about the possible establishment of Puritanism as the official religion of the new republic. Jefferson wrote that the religious protection clauses of the First Amendment represent an “act of the whole American people” in “building a wall of separation between Church & State.” Jefferson’s letter then went largely unremarked-upon for almost a century, until the US Supreme Court’s 1878 decision in Reynolds v. United States. In that case, the Court quoted another passage in Jefferson’s letter to articulate a distinction between religious belief and practice. The Court referenced Jefferson’s “wall of separation between church and state” in the majority opinion in Everson v. Board of Education of Ewing in 1947,10 a case involving the state reimbursing families for the cost of busing their children to religious schools. Since Everson, the phrase has often been quoted in court decisions and has entered the popular culture as an articulation of what most Americans think is the legal line between religion and government.
In reality, the separation of religion from civic life at local, state, and federal levels in the US has always been an optical illusion. The phrase “separation of church and state” represents the idea of a desired Constitutional principle—namely, that in a pluralistic democracy, religious (“church”) and governmental (“state”) authorities do not intersect or interact. Yet, in the past as today, encounters and intersections of piety and policy have generated intense political controversy and legal contests. Interactions between democratic civic life and diverse religious cultures have inevitably led to conflicts over issues like prayer in public schools, Christmas or Easter symbols on government property, and religious expression in supposedly neutral spaces like workplaces, the military, and prisons. Rather than a reality, the “separation of church and state” serves either as an aspiration, for those who believe that personal freedom resides in the separation of religion from civic life, or as an obstacle, for those who would use the powers of the government to impose their religious beliefs on others.
The First Amendment states: “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The first part of this directive, known as the Establishment Clause—“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”—prohibits the federal government from supporting any single religion or religious denomination or sect—the concern the Danbury Baptists expressed to President Jefferson, resulting in his 1802 letter, described above. The second part of this Constitutional guarantee, known as the Free Exercise Clause, bars Congress from making any law “prohibiting the free exercise” of religion. Among the topics in the Bill of Rights,11 religion is in a category by itself. The Bill of Rights does not protect people from institutional discrimination based on race, class, gender, or any attribute other than religion. Racial protections, like the extension of US Constitutional restrictions to the states, did not exist until the passage of Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments after the Civil War. Religion is also the only attribute with explicit and absolute constitutional protection: “Congress shall make no law …” All other protections in the Bill of Rights are adjective-modified and thus limited (“unreasonable searches,” “speedy … trial,” “cruel and unusual punishment”).12 The interpretation of these clauses is left to judges who are themselves products of existing cultural traditions and social hierarchies.
Some see the religion clauses as a grand gesture conveying broad freedoms to all. However, the First Amendment was really designed to be a religious “mutual assurance pact”13 agreed upon by the major competing Protestant denominations in the original thirteen colonies to prevent any one of them from becoming a federally established church supported by federal taxes or from being eradicated through restrictions on the freedom to practice or believe. (Official state churches were funded by state taxes until the mid-nineteenth century.14) The motivations behind the First Amendment would thus be better summed up with the words: “If I can’t have it my way, you can’t have it your way.”
To be clear, the optical illusion here is the idea that the Constitution demands a separation between church and state, and that such a separation actually exists as a result. Most Americans believe that government is not involved with religion and vice versa; this idea of separation helps to maintain the myth that all religions are welcomed and can be practiced freely. In fact, both clauses, but particularly the free exercise clause, have been subject to numerous interpretations by the US Supreme Court. These Supreme Court decisions have often functioned to support free religious practice claims brought by Christian groups, and to restrict free religious practice of non-Christians.15 The principle of church/state separation has sometimes been ignored entirely,
