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Supreme Court Review

Article Title

The Religious Geography of Town of Greece v Galloway

Abstract

To attempt to come to terms with American religious history apart from its geographical dimensions … is to risk missing something crucially important.Americans are obsessed with history. That’s especially true for American lawyers, constitutional lawyers not least among them. Of course there are practical reasons for this obsession, including the age of the Constitution itself. As long as some form of originalism remains important to judicial or scholarly interpretation of the Constitution, moreover, there are strategic reasons for any constitutional lawyer to take an interest in historical questions. But history alone is an insufficient interpretive guide. Among other things, in a word, we might consider geography. This is certainly true for the study of American religion and religious freedom. Martin Marty, a leading figure in that field, has noted “American religionists’ … obsession with time over space”—with a temporal, rather than a spatial, understanding of American religion and religious pluralism. The fixation with history is equally apparent in judicial decisions and legal scholarship dealing with church-state law. Many of the key decisions of the United States Supreme Court dealing with the Religion Clauses center on grand historical narratives, as much mythical as real, that purport to dictate the shape of the law in this area. Fueled both by the cases and by their own needs and interests, many scholars are equally focused on the lessons history holds for Religion Clause adjudication.

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