Welcome! This guide will serve as a starting point for Shippensburg University students wishing to conduct research on various aspects of the national debate over church and state. You will find sources that introduce you to your topic and keep you up-to-date with links to news articles, research websites, journal articles, and research reports concerning church and state.
Search Terms
Main Term(s): church & state, religion & politics Related Terms: freedom of religion, establishment clause (constitutional law), separation of church and state Broader Terms:United States Supreme Court Narrower Terms: religion in schools
In the first of two major volumes, Kent Greenawalt focuses on one of the Constitution's main clauses concerning religion: the Free Exercise Clause. Beginning with a brief account of the clause's origin and a short history of the Supreme Court's leading decisions about freedom of religion, he devotes a chapter to each of the main controversies encountered by judges and lawmakers.
In this second of two major volumes, Kent Greenawalt focuses on the Constitution's Establishment Clause, which forbids government from favoring one religion over another, or religion over secularism. The author begins with a history of the clause, its underlying principles, and the Supreme Court's main decisions on establishment, and proceeds to consider specific controversies.
Does the toleration of liberal democratic society mean that religious faiths are left substantively intact, so long as they respect the rights of others? Or do liberal principles presuppose a deeper transformation of religion? Does life in democratic society itself transform religion? In Making Religion Safe for Democracy, J. Judd Owen explores these questions by tracing a neglected strand of Enlightenment political thought that presents a surprisingly unified reinterpretation of Christianity by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Thomas Jefferson. Owen then turns to Alexis de Tocqueville's analysis of the effects of democracy on religion in the early United States. Tocqueville finds a religion transformed by democracy in a way that bears a striking resemblance to what the Enlightenment thinkers sought, while offering a fundamentally different interpretation of what is at stake in that transformation. Making Religion Safe for Democracy offers a novel framework for understanding the ambiguous status of religion in modern democratic society.
This tour of the American church/state issue revisits past controversies and personalities in the hope of enlightening present-day debates. Contrary to popular belief, the Constitution does not contain the phrase "separation of church and state." The First Amendment states only that the government cannot pass laws establishing or prohibiting religious practices. What were the intentions of the Founding Fathers when it came to the relationship between faith and politics? What do those intentions mean today? Finally, the book focuses on the post-1940 era, during which church-state controversies came before the Supreme Court. In the course of the discussion, readers will learn about complex legal and theological issues and debates between the great and powerful, but also about ordinary Americans whose religious scruples led to some of the most important legal cases in U.S. history.
The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment governs the relationship between the institutions of the church and those of the state; the Supreme Court, as arbiter of the Constitution, has, since 1947, sought to determine where the line between the two should be drawn. This book shows how and why the Court drew the line in particular cases and how and why the lines that were drawn by the Court had an impact on the relationship between institutions of government and the Church, shaping US politics and society.
Newly revised and updated, To Serve God and Mammon is a classic in the field of religion and politics that provides an unbiased introduction and overview of church-state relations in the United States. Jelen begins by exploring the inherent tension between the Establishment and Free Exercise clauses of the First Amendment. He then examines how different actors in American politics (e.g., the courts, Congress, the president, ordinary citizens) have different and conflicting values that affect their attitudes and actions toward the relationship between the sacred and the secular. Finally, he discusses how the fragmented nature of political authority in the United States provides the basis for continuing conflict concerning church-state relations.
The third edition of this classic book provides a comprehensive, multidisciplinary overview of the history, theory, law, and comparative analysis of American religious liberty from the earliest colonial period through the most recent Supreme Court cases. The authors present balanced, accessible discussions of controversial issues, such as funding religious schools and charities and displaying religious symbols on government property. A concluding chapter also compares contemporary American religious liberty law with international human rights standards.
This provocative book shows how the United States Supreme Court has used constitutional history in church-state cases. Donald L. Drakeman describes the ways in which the justices have portrayed the framers' actions in a light favoring their own views about how church and state should be separated. He then marshals the historical evidence, leading to a surprising conclusion about the original meaning of the First Amendment's establishment clause: the framers originally intended the establishment clause only as a prohibition against a single national church. In showing how conventional interpretations have gone astray, he casts light on the close relationship between religion and government in America and brings to life a fascinating parade of church-state constitutional controversies from the founding era to the present.
Since 1947, the Supreme Court has promised government neutrality toward religion, but in a nation whose motto is "In God We Trust" and which pledges allegiance to "One Nation under God," the public square is anything but neutral--a paradox not lost on a rapidly secularizing America and a point of contention among those who identify all expressions of religion by government as threats to a free society. Ledewitz seeks common ground for believers and nonbelievers regarding the law of church and state.
Includes links to an extensive number of government contacts and publications related to religious discrimination, with a particular emphasis on anti-Muslim discrimination.
The Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Dept. of Justice is the main government agency involved in domestic religious freedom issues. They publish this newsletter several times each year.
This is a major, independent, bi-partisan commission tasked to monitor religious freedom around the world. It issues annual reports for some 35 nations that it monitors, for which it has varying levels of concern about religious freedom.
This is the major governmental agency tasked to monitor international religious freedom. It produces an annual report covering virtually all nations worldwide.
Advocacy Organizations
Advocacy Groups Focussed on Protecting the Separation of Religion & State
This library database serves as a search engine to search most library databases at the same time, including magazine and journal databases, e-book collections, and the library catalog. News databases are not included in a comprehensive way. Supplement this with direct searching of ProQuest Newstand and Lexis Nexis Academic. Search results default to items that the library owns, either in online or print format. Remove the "Available in Library Collection" limiter to retrieve items available through interlibrary loan.
Academic Search Complete is our most important general database. covering all subject areas. It is useful for research in all classes, as it includes 26+ million newspaper, magazine, and journal articles, with 50% of these immediately available in full-text.
Access from on campus or off campus with Ship ID.
Contents indexed in Ship Library Discovery Search.
One of the most comprehensive news databases in the world, ProQuest Global Newstream includes access to over 3000 news sources, including 2,200 newspapers, as well as blogs, podcasts, websites and news wire feeds worldwide.
Development note - alt link use stats: (91 total hits, 33 since 7/2012 -- 10 /2012)
This library database is one of the world's largest full-text databases, including very extensive news, legal, and business information. Along with ProQuest Newstand, it is our primary source of news information.
Humanities Source is designed to meet the needs of students, researchers and educators interested in all aspects of the humanities. The collection includes full text for more than 1,400 journals, with citations to over 3.5 million articles, including book reviews. Coverage in Humanities Source includes worldwide content pertaining to literary, scholarly and creative thought.
Covers scholarly publications in sociology, social work, criminal justice, and related fields. Contains >2.5 million articles and other materials (70% in full text) with deep coverage from 1960 and some back to 1882.
Library database that covers the most important and controversial issues of the day. Contains the full text of CQ Researcher, a weekly publication. Each issue provides a comprehensive overview and background essay, data tables and graphs, chronology, pro-con starter, and list of major research and advocacy groups. Includes extensive lists of sources and hot-linked footnotes throughout.
Access from on campus or off campus with Ship ID.
Quality Web Sources
High Quality Web Source Finder
Use this search tool to find high quality web sources for your research. You can limit by In-Depth Journalism, Newpaper Topic Guides, Science News, CRS (Congressional Research Service) Reports, and Web Directories. Please Note: Several ads will appear first in the results list.
ProPublica is a freely available website produced by a major online non-profit news organization dedicated to in-depth investigative reporting about current issues in the public interest. ProPublica features two kinds of reporting: Investigations, which include a series of in-depth articles about a topic (often between 15 and 30 articles - major topics range from dozens to 100+ articles). MuckReads are shorter reports featuring investigative journalism from other news agencies. Major areas of interest include, among others: healthcare and the health industry, fracking, censorship, money and politics, and financial and economic issues.
Reveal is a freely available website and the online media platform for the Center for Investigative Journalism, a major online non-profit news organization, founded in 1977, and dedicated to in-depth investigative reporting about current issues in the public interest. They publish series of investigative reports on a topic (typically between 10 and 20). Major areas of coverage include: criminal justice, the environment, guns, health care, labor and employment, national security, religion, surveillance and privacy, and veterans.
The Center for Public Integrity is a freely available website produced by a major online non-profit news organization dedicated to in-depth investigative reporting about current issues in the public interest, with a special focus on accountability and fairness, especially in terms of the role and influence of money. Topics featured include politics and elections, national security business, the environment, juvenile justice and health.
NPR is one of the most important freely-available sources of investigative journalism. It includes excellent topical pages but these are not easily browseable on the website. Use the High Quality Web Source Finder search box to locate the topical pages for your issue.
This very high quality web site, located at Harvard's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy and sponsored by leading academic journalism programs, guides journalists and other researchers to find scholarly sources related to many of the most important topics in the news. Whenever the source is not available in full-text, use the discovery layer or library A-Z journal list to get library access to the article or to order it on interlibrary loan.
Newspaper Topic Guides
A number of important national newspapers have topic or issue sections of their website that bring together all the paper's articles on particular topics. The leading example of this is "Times Topics" from the New York Times. Each topic guide/section has a search tool that lets you refine your search.
Unfortunately, these sections are often not easy to browse or locate on the newspaper websites. Use the "High Quality Web Source Finder" search box above to search for your topic. Then choose the Newspaper Topic Guides tab to look for these in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Chicago Tribune. If you should hit a pay wall when browsing these newspapers, simply search for articles from any of these three papers using the ProQuest Newstand library database.
Congressional Research Service Reports (CRS Reports)
The Congressional Research Service (CRS) is the public policy research division of Congress. It issues detailed research reports on a very wide range of issues. CRS doesn't maintain its own website, but its reports are available through several organizations and libraries.
Website that attempts to make all CRS reports easily available to the public. The result of a bi-partisan movement to get Congress to pass a bill requiring open access.
The University of North Texas maintains a freely available digital library collection of Congressional Research Service reports, with the goal "to provide integrated, searchable access to many of the full-text CRS reports that have been available at a variety of different web sites since 1990" -- website. Best search tool for finding CRS reports. Update holdings of specific reports through the Federation of American Scientists or through a web search on the name of a report.
This freely available website produced by the Vanderbilt University Libraries provides an alphabetical topical directory to important websites on some 50 current issues. These guide pages typically include sections for these kinds of web resources: Basic Sites, Government, International, News, Statistics, Interest Groups and Research Centers and Other Educational Sites.
Welcome! This guide will serve as a starting point for Shippensburg University students wishing to conduct research on various aspects of the national debate over church and state. You will find sources that introduce you to your topic and keep you up-to-date with links to news articles, research websites, journal articles, and research reports concerning church and state.
Religion and the Constitution, Vol. 1 by 
Religion and the Constitution, Vol. 2 by 
Making Religion Safe for Democracy: Transformation from Hobbes to Tocqueville by 
Separation of Church and State by 
The Church-State Debate: Religion, Education and the Establishment Clause in Post War America by 
To Serve God and Mammon: Church-State Relations in American Politics by 
Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment by 
Church, State, and Original Intent by 
Church, State, and the Crisis in American Secularism by 
