Equal Aid to All? Accommodationism and Secularism in Postwar America

In the early years of the Cold War, the Supreme Court’s decisions in Everson (1947), McCollum (1948), and Zorach (1952) spawned a national referendum on American church-state relations. These cases inspired a flurry of work by legal scholars as well as a powerful stream of writings by public intellectuals. One argument that reverberated throughout the church-state debates of the period was the notion that the First Amendment did not prohibit government aid to religion so long as such aid was provided to all religions equally. Like other parties to American church-state debates, defenders of this “accommodationist position” sought its roots in the founding period. But I will attempt to show that this position gained momentum specifically in relation to the GI Bill (1944), which circumvented “separationist” concerns about government aid to religion by allocating aid directly to individuals. This paper will trace the genesis of the accommodationist argument and its uses in the hands of both legal scholars and public intellectuals during the 1940s and 1950s. Building outward from the writings of the Catholic intellectual John Courtney Murray, the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and the Jewish thinker Will Herberg, it will suggest that anxieties about secularism and secularization sustained the accommodationist position, much as fears of Catholicism sustained the separationist position, as Hamburger has argued. Accommodationists routinely assumed that separationists sought to sever Christianity from public life, and that it could never be in the interest of a genuinely religious person to endorse strict separationism. Thus, in their view, the notion that the First Amendment merely sought to prevent unequal treatment was a compromise position. However, these early accommodationists consistently downplayed the danger that, by making government the arbiter of religious authenticity, they might foster the very inequalities that the First Amendment sought to prevent.