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202553 https://hdl.handle.net/2286/R.2.N.202553 http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ All Rights Reserved 2025 32 pages Masters Thesis Academic theses en Kim, Sarah Porwancher, Andrew McNamara, Peter Hay, William Arizona State University Partial requirement for: M.A., Arizona State University, 2025 Field of study: Liberal Studies The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the US Constitution mandates: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” The intended meaning of that clause is not self-evident. To be sure, it bans the creation of an established church—i.e., a state-sanctioned faith. But does it require the separation of church and state? Or are some forms of church-state involvement permissible? For nearly a century, American church-state jurisprudence has lived in the shadow of one Supreme Court case above all others: Everson v. Board of Education (1947). Justice Hugo Black, writing for a majority of justices on the Court, undertook an analysis of the American founding and concluded that the Establishment Clause does indeed mandate a “wall between church and state.” This paper argues that Everson rests on a series of historical fallacies. By plumbing Virginia’s history in the 1780s, this study debunks Everson’s problematic rendition of the past. Black claimed that Virginians’ struggle against the established church was emblematic of the American story at large. He emphasized the fight over Patrick Henry’s 1784 bill that would channel taxpayer funds to Christian institutions in Virginia. In Black's telling, the American founders (and future presidents) James Madison and Thomas Jefferson led the fight against this bill, and their separationist stance thereafter shaped the Establishment Clause. Black’s attempt to historically legitimize his holding left both the Court and the American people to incorrectly assume thereafter that the separation of church and state was an animating purpose of the Establishment Clause. His portrait of Virginia is misleading, and his claim that Jefferson and Madison were the chief opponents of Henry’s bill is wrong. Moreover, his premise that these two founders spoke for their generation is erroneous; equally prominent founders consistently staked out alternative positions. The historical record thus defies any facile bid to see in the early American republic a monolithic conception of church-state relations that can be readily employed to resolve modern Establishment Clause disputes. American History Exorcising Everson's Ghost: The History that Haunts American Church-state Jurisprudence